New doco reveals the abuse inflicted on those tasked with explaining Covid

A new documentary reveals the abuse inflicted on one of New Zealand's leading microbiologists.

The 2021 New Zealander of the Year Dr Siouxsie Wiles is a part of a new documentary film called Ms. Information, detailing the harassment she received for explaining Covid.

"I'm still getting death threats from people who don't believe Covid exists or don't think we should've done what we did to have those two years of very little virus here."

Although the Covid pandemic may be an afterthought for most, the Auckland University microbiologist and others are still hard at work contributing to an understudied field.

"We're living in a time where we don't have any restrictions at all. Lots of people think Covid is over even though there's still many people dying every week of it," she says.

Studying infectious disease for more than ten years, Wiles says the arrival of the Covid pandemic coincided with their mice experiments.

"When the pandemic struck and we started to see these new variants arise that become more infectious we were like 'oh yeah that's exactly what we saw'.

"What happened in the pandemic didn't surprise me based on our experiments that we did in mice."

Siouxie Wiles says before Covid struck that they had conducted experiments using bacteria that only affected mice.

"What we showed a long time ago was that if we allow these mice to infect each other that the bacteria become more infectious."

Watch the full interview below: