On Tuesday, 2nd May, the Natural Health Alliance hosted a public meeting to discuss and inform the public about the Therapeutic Products Bill and what it means for consumers, health professionals, importers, and manufacturers of natural health products.
Our access to knowledge about traditional remedies and food as medicine and having health choices, including control over what we put in our bodies, are fundamental human rights. This Bill threatens rights that most people agree are fundamental freedoms, yet for some incomprehensible reason, mainstream media is trying to make people like me sound like anti-vaxxer kooks.
This issue has nothing to do with being anti or pro-vaccine: it is about being pro-health and pro-choice - nothing more and nothing less.
Here's an example of the kind of conspiratorial drivel being directed our way by MSM:
And here is another:
This is not journalism but carefully crafted propaganda.
The claim that 80% of the natural health industry supports this legislation is complete and utter rubbish and was refuted on the day by Paddy Fahy of the Natural Health Alliance in the presence of the Post's reporter, Bridie Witton, yet she still reported the lie (or, is that misinformation).
As you might gather from the photo in the Post's article, there were more than 300 in attendance, fewer at any time, but people were coming and going depending on the timing and duration of their lunch breaks, so easily 300 people.
The meeting closed with this unanimous call to the government:
Here are the presentations in the order they were delivered on the day:
What you can do:
Please:
Join the Natural Health Alliance and, ideally, donate. https://www.naturalhealthalliance.co.nz/
Support the political parties that oppose this legislation.
Meet, phone or write to your Member of Parliament to express your concerns.
Ask that Natural Health Products and Therapies be given their own legislation with rules commensurate with their low to nil risks of harm while recognising their positive contributions to the health of all New Zealanders.
End of article.
Additional Reading
What follows is an opinion piece article by Paddy Fahy following the meeting and in response to the misinformation being reported by MSM. Unfortunately, the article was refused. Isn't it censorship when only one side of a debate is aired while the other is ignored?
The Therapeutic Products Bill
By Paddy Fahy, Chairman, Natural Health Alliance
Mother Nature has been healing people since before civilisations began. The famous Greek physician Hippocrates is said to have understood the healing power of nature. “Let your food be thy medicine; and your medicine, thy food.” Diet and lifestyle are the biggest determinants of personal health. Through the responsible use of naturally acquired minerals and vitamins, there is no reason why each and every one of us is able to live a long and healthy life, well into old age.
The Natural Health Alliance, the voice and representative organisation of the natural products industry, was encouraged by the more than 200 people who turned out to our public meeting in Wellington recently to discuss the Therapeutic Products Bill, which is working its way through Parliament.
It demonstrated just how important this piece of legislation is to every Kiwi, more than half
of whom use natural health products.
As well-known Wellington health practitioner Gary Moller told the meeting, the miracle of the human body is that under the right conditions it can heal itself – conditions such as fresh air, sunshine, exercise, healthy foods, as well as the appropriate use of plants containing concentrated nutrients and medicinal phytochemicals.
Humankind’s reliance on big pharmaceutical companies and the industrial medical complex
is taking us further away from tried and true remedies that have been healing us since time immemorial. This is but one reason why our membership, made up of the country’s natural products manufacturers, importers, suppliers, retailers and health practitioners have legitimate and existential concerns over the Therapeutic Products Bill.
The Bill itself is a bad rewrite of the 1981 Medicines Act. There have been a number of attempts by the health bureaucracy to convince politicians that natural health products should be regulated like Big Pharma. In 2007, similar legislation was scotched by the Labour Party under Helen Clark and again in 2017 when this current Labour Party was stopped by NZ First and Winston Peters from implementing similar legislation. That’s why Winston Peters addressed our public meeting in Wellington – to confirm he still supported our industry.
We don’t know the motivation behind the Ministry of Health’s and Medsafe’s obsession with bringing natural health products under the same regulatory control. They’ve failed on previous occasions and yet continue to lobby new Ministers to implement these controls. Is
that what people mean when they make reference to the Deep State trying to control our lives?
We do know members of the Natural Health Alliance are feeling burdened with having to fight the same fight every time a new government gets elected and our over-reaching bureaucrats try to get new laws past an administration. This is the third time in 15 years, and in that time not one person has died or been injured from natural health products – only healed.
Which is why the public are doubtful of the claims made by bureaucrats: that the legislation is needed to keep people safe, that natural health products pose an unacceptable risk to people’s lives, and that more regulation will increase exports. How they came to any of those conclusions is mind-boggling. If the Bill is passed into law, it will see a fair number of Kiwi health suppliers shutter their businesses and health practitioners close their doors for fear of being jailed or excessively fined for “over-prescribing” vitamin C or some other product.
Since 2017, when the last attempt was made to pass similar legislation, there have been a
few industry buyouts as large, overseas pharmaceutical corporations bought off suppliers and manufacturers. That has changed the natural products industry to an extent but might is not right and the fundamental truisms that saw the previous two attempts to unnecessarily regulate our industry fail, still remain: health products derived from nature pose little to no threat to consumers.
The natural health products imported are almost entirely from Australia, the United States and Europe. Those manufacturers abide by complex regulations enforced respectively by the TGA, the FDA and the EU – products that have already been through a robust production oversight regime, and the Therapeutic Products Bill is adding another and unnecessary layer of regulation and additional costs (read “taxes”) to local businesses.
The fact that the natural health products industry is yet again having to argue our case against a group of faceless officials, and fight to keep our businesses and industry alive, demonstrates the extent to which the burgeoning bureaucracy is holding our country to ransom.
The only losers in the passing of this legislation are Kiwi consumers who will see less competition and less supply in the retail sector. The winners will be the big US tech market, websites such as Amazon and iHerb, as Kiwis will be forced to buy their product online and without access to the advice and guidance of experienced natural health professionals, like Gary Moller, who will be forced to exit the industry.