‘New Zealand Is Not North Korea’

The following was brought to my attention and is very hard to argue with:

Extracted from the Feb 13 Economist’s leading article, How well will vaccines work? :

For all these reasons, governments need to start planning for covid-19 as an endemic disease. Today they treat it as an emergency that will pass. To see how those ways of thinking differ, consider New Zealand, which has sought to be covid-free by bolting its doors against the world. In this way it has kept registered deaths down to just 25, but such a draconian policy makes no sense as a permanent defence: New Zealand is not North Korea. As vulnerable Kiwis are vaccinated, their country will come under growing pressure to open its borders—and hence to start to tolerate endemic covid-19 infections and deaths.

Across the world governments will have to work out when and how to switch from emergency measures to policies that are economically and socially sustainable indefinitely. The transition will be politically hard in places that have invested a lot in being covid-free. Nowhere more so than China, where vaccination is slow. The Communist Party has defined every case of covid-19 as unacceptable and wide circulation of the disease as a sign of the decadence of Western democracies.

While on the subject of the vaccine, I see all-knowing Alison Mau is taking her turn to have a crack at talkback radio today. The left having despatched with Banks and Plunket will now have their sights set on Peter Williams, so her attack comes as no surprise.

What does surprise is the constant characterisation of Sean Plunket as ‘hard right’. He isn’t. He’s centrist politically. So is Peter Williams. They both believe in the role of the state in education, health, law and order albeit questioning the nature of the role and degree of intervention.

Williams spent quite a bit of time last week talking about the impending intention to vaccinate all New Zealanders, as is his right. People are entitled to discuss the vaccine, the ethics of being made to comply by employers, of needing to comply as a passport to travel. I’ve never had a flu jab so am wondering why I would have a covid jab. But soon it’ll be forbidden to think aloud, let alone on a radio station.

Forget New Zealand’s “draconian” covid response. It must surely strike the likes of Alison Mau, eventually, that shoving this country down a very slippery slope of snowballing intolerance risks reaching an endpoint which has more in common with North Korea than the free world.

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