Former public servant has no

Barry Young is facing up to seven years in prison after allegedly stealing health data surrounding the Covid-19 vaccine roll out. In his first sit-down interview with major media, he tells he has no regrets.

Barry Young is wearing a black “New Zealand” cap, a denim shirt, shorts and bare feet as we meet for a camera-less interview at a Wellington cafe, appropriately called Common Ground.

It’s January and we’re a stone’s throw from his Johnsonville home where, six weeks earlier, police broke his door down with a battering ram while he was at the mall.

“I was out getting some dog roll and some milk and I came back ... they were on me like flies. Eight cops, three or four of them got me in handcuffs.

“They put them on so tight.”

The Thursday before, Young had appeared in an hour-long video with Liz Gunn, a former broadcaster and would-be politician, where the pair went through huge amounts of private health data, concluding the Covid-19 vaccine must be “a killer”.

Their claims have been thoroughly debunked by experts in vaccine safety, data analyses and Covid-19.

Was he scared? “Terrified. I’ve never been arrested before in my life. I was shitting bricks,” 56-year-old Young said.

“You know I had a perfect record, absolutely perfect. I’m a super normal guy. I worked at a high level.”

Personal details of at least 12,000 people, including many Covid-19 vaccinators, were leaked as a result of the data breach.

Young has been charged with dishonestly accessing a computer. He has pleaded not guilty and elected a trial by jury, now scheduled to be held in April 2025.

“Would I do the same thing again? Yes I would, in a heartbeat. My ideal scenario was not this. I wasn’t wanting to be the focus of attention.

“I was wanting to give someone else that mantle, ideally a politician or someone like Winston Peters. Or if Liz Gunn had been elected, then that would be my choice. But unfortunately, that didn't happen.”

Gunn is a former broadcaster and prominent conspiracy theorist who ran in the 2023 general election as leader of the NZ Loyal party, which received 34,478 votes in total. Gunn has likened New Zealand’s Covid-19 vaccine mandates to rape.

If Gunn had been elected, “she would have had parliamentary privilege and she would have brought this to the Government’s attention but because of that, it had to be me”, he says.

Outside Wellington District Court in

February, Young appealed to his supporters, particularly public servants, to “bring out” information that may be protected.

He says Peters did respond to his text before the data was revealed but only to ask who was messaging him.

Young’s motivation rests on a desire for greater scrutiny and analysis of Covid-19 vaccine safety. Health New Zealand – Te Whatu Ora has already said it was carrying out “very detailed analysis of the data” involved in the breach.

He says he has received “loads” of vaccines in the past, though never got the Covid-19 vaccine. “I’m not anti-vax, I’m not anti anything. I’m pro-choice,” he says in the interview.

But if he stepped on a rusty nail today, he would hesitate before getting a tetanus shot, saying he would trust his immune system.

“It’s up to the government to show us that [the Covid-19 vaccine] is safe and effective,” Young wrote in response to an initial approach on LinkedIn, in the making of this interview. “Open, honest, sceptical debate with no agenda. At the end of the day it might be the safest thing in the world ever invented.”

He says “alarm bells” began going off shortly after the vaccine roll out began and he claims he was “slowly watching people die”.

He says Oxford University experts have backed his concerns, but won’t say who they are.

Young admits he did not control for age in drawing conclusions about data surrounding death, which was the greatest criticism from vaccine safety experts. He has no clinical background or expert vaccine knowledge.

Asked whether he raised these concerns with his former employer, he retorts that