Adam Creighton of The Australian is one of the few mainstream journalists willing to speak the truth about COVID lockdowns. Also, unlike most of the mainstream media, he is no starry-eyed Ardern fan, either.
Put both of those together, and you get his blunt indictment of the COVID policies of Ardern – and most of the West. Put simply: Ardern and the rest abandoned well-established pandemic protocols and fell in lockstep with the Chinese Communist Party. It’s been a naked grab for power by politicians and bureaucrats, in defiance of all scientific evidence.
As Creighton notes, from Joe Biden to Jacinda Ardern, Western governments are in many ways behaving practically indistinguishably from any totalitarian regime. Most especially in their determination to control “truth” and censor dissent.
A few days ago Jacinda Ardern urged New Zealanders to take all non-government information with a “grain of salt”. “Dismiss anything else, we will continue to be your single source of truth,” she said in remarks that would have been considered bizarre in the era Before Covid. “We will provide information frequently and share everything we can.”
Everything, however, didn’t extend to a health ministry report on the country’s elimination strategy that vanished online on June 24, a day after Atlanta-based attorney Michael Senger revealed its complimentary references to China on social media.
The report was embarrassing because it illustrated the pioneer of our novel response to the pandemic: the Chinese Communist Party, for whom controlling information is par for the course.
As Senger revealed, the Ardern government not only wholesale copied Beijing’s lockdowns, it tried to hide what it had done. Ardern’s Aeotearoa/New Zealand’s COVID-19 elimination strategy: an overview paper explicitly stated: “we focus on the measures used in the Hubei region”. Everything, from “physical distancing” to “surveillance” was adopted wholesale from China.
The day after Senger tweeted this revelation, the New Zealand Ministry of Health deleted the paper from its website.
“We will provide information frequently and share everything we can.”
The CCP strategy, adopted enthusiastically by Ardern, directly contradicted long-established public health advice.
“The lockdown of 11 million people is unprecedented in public health history, so it is certainly not a recommendation the WHO has made,” the World Health Organisation’s Beijing representative said in January last year, referring to the Wuhan lockdown. The people of Wuhan became trailblazers for the 11 million Australians locked down across Victoria and NSW, and the hundreds of millions of others in between.
Eighteen months on, all the features of the Wuhan response – lockdowns, mandatory masks, surveillance and border closures – have become standard practice, despite each specifically being ruled out by the WHO in 2019.
The WHO understood such extreme measures in free societies would have profound and enduring economic, social, constitutional and political ramifications. Real life wasn’t a game of SimCity, where elite public servants, largely immune from the costs of their own decisions, could dial restrictions up and down.
Public health bodies had spent decades developing best-practice strategies for exactly such pandemics as the Chinese virus. These plans were developed based upon the evidence of pandemics past – many of them worse than COVID.
All that went out the window.
Interestingly the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention has yet to even declare a severity level for COVID-19.
Because it would fall around category three based on its own criteria: in other words, not nearly severe enough to justify the measures used to contain it.
Even if another Spanish flu-type pandemic (magnitudes worse than Covid-19) emerged, schools should be shut for only 12 weeks at most, the plan said – certainly not for a year, as has been the case in California and some other states. Forcing businesses to close and well people to stay home and controlling information weren’t even canvassed.
The history of public health bureaucracy is a history of authoritarianism. Even anti-smoking policies first emerged in the Third Reich.
Susan Michie, a prominent member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies committee that advises the British government as well as a member of the British Communist Party, repeatedly has slammed July 19 Freedom Day as reckless and urged government to make masks and social distancing compulsory forever to suppress the flu.
Coincidence? It’s almost as if for some public health advocates Covid-19 has been a springboard to increase permanently the power of government as much as it has been about saving lives.
The Australian
While public health has indeed delivered extraordinary benefits on many fronts, from sanitation to declining smoking rates, the fact is that the public health bureaucrats have long ago picked the low-hanging fruit. They’ve had to scrabble ever-harder to gin up a justification for their cosy sinecures and bloated budgets, in an era when the human species has never been healthier and safer.
A problem solved is an existential crisis for an activist, and a free people are anathema to an authoritarian.
The Chinese virus has been a gift from the heavens (or the Politburo) for creeps who want to micromanage every aspect of our increasingly constrained lives.
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