A retired New Zealand radiologist suspended from practice for allegedly spreading COVID-19 falsehoods about vaccines is defending himself before a health tribunal, a report published on 17 April in the New Zealand Herald has stated.
Dr. Peter Canaday is a former radiologist with the Taranaki District Health Board. He faces a professional misconduct charge stemming from an interview and two presentations he delivered in 2021 on the pandemic and New Zealand's vaccine rollout, the Herald wrote.
The five-day hearing has been brought by a professional conduct committee chosen by the Medical Council of New Zealand.
In July 2021, Canaday participated in a radio interview and offered two online presentations: "Courageous Convos: Dr. Peter Canaday and COVID-19" and "the Pfizer vaccine: Fact or Fantasy?" Both of the presentations were uploaded to Voices for Freedom, an antivaccination group, the Herald reported; Canaday claimed that there was "a link between the vaccine and sterility, miscarriages, and deaths, and other COVID-19 treatments had been suppressed in favour of the Pfizer vaccine," the publication noted.
Canaday retired in 2021 but still holds a certificate to practice medicine, according to the Herald.
![Overview of the study design. (A) The fully automated deep learning framework was developed to estimate body composition (BC) (defined as subcutaneous adipose tissue [SAT] in liters; visceral adipose tissue [VAT] in liters; skeletal muscle [SM] in liters; SM fat fraction [SMFF] as a percentage; and intramuscular adipose tissue [IMAT] in deciliters) from MRI. The fully automated framework comprised one model (model 1) to quantify different BC measures (SAT, VAT, SM, SMFF, and IMAT) as three-dimensional (3D) measures from whole-body MRI scans. The second model (model 2) was trained to identify standardized anatomic landmarks along the craniocaudal body axis (z coordinate field), which allowed for subdividing the whole-body measures into different subregions typically examined on clinical routine MRI scans (chest, abdomen, and pelvis). (B) BC was quantified from whole-body MRI in over 66,000 individuals from two large population-based cohort studies, the UK Biobank (UKB) (36,317 individuals) and the German National Cohort (NAKO) (30,291 individuals). Bar graphs show age distribution by sex and cohort. BMI = body mass index. (C) After the performance assessment of the fully automated framework, the change in BC measures, distributions, and profiles across age decades were investigated. Age-, sex-, and height-adjusted body composition reference curves were calculated and made publicly available in a web-based z-score calculator (https://circ-ml.github.io).](https://img.auntminnieeurope.com/mindful/smg/workspaces/default/uploads/2026/05/body-comp.XgAjTfPj1W.jpg?auto=format%2Ccompress&dpr=2&fit=crop&h=167&q=70&w=250)