Much can be learned from the past two years of Covid policy, but if there’s one thing in recent weeks that has struck me the most, it is this: The luvvies of the left-wing journalist class cannot bear to face reality.
Such is still the case in New Zealand, a land of so much promise yet so steadfast in destroying itself.
Roll up, Jacinda Ardern, a woman so steadfast in her own high opinions of herself that she seems to have forgotten her country’s own laws, as seen just last week when her government lost — again — in the High Court to Grounded Kiwis, a group advocating for citizens based abroad who were negatively impacted by the nation’s managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) mechanism situated at the border.
In short, the ‘lottery’ aspect of quarantine, that is to say, the aspect that turned bonafide Kiwi passport holders outside of the country into overnight gameshow contestants who had to convince government ministers they were worthy enough to return to a hotel isolation room (at extortionate cost), did not, in the words of the court, “sufficiently allow individual circumstances to be considered and prioritised” when the government determined their so-called suitability to reenter. This, to the lead justice, was wholly ‘unlawful’.
Add to this the government’s loss in the same court when challenged by members of the Police and Defence Forces regarding the justification of vaccine mandates as a condition to work on the front lines (breaching the Bill of Rights Act), and suddenly the squeaky clean ‘progressive’ image that Jacinda Ardern constantly relies upon to bat away any type of negative attention, looks a lot less Kiwi pavlova and a lot more chaotic palaver.
Nevertheless, fanatical defenders of hers, epitomised slimily well in a recent Guardian piece written by Morgan Godfery, a typically snooty servant of New Zealand’s academic-cum-mainstream press club, will lionise her every decision however indignant (and wrong) they often were.
Taking time to go after the “political right” in the aftermath of the High Court’s latest ruling (the ‘oppositional right’ National Party barely once stirred at the prospect of a vax-pass divided society), Godfery’s lockdown love-fest intent is clear as he tries his darn hardest to remind readers how ‘successful’ the government response to the pandemic actually was.
“For almost two years New Zealanders kept the virus from breaching the border. After the first lockdown in March 2020, Covid-19 was eliminated and New Zealanders went about their lives more or less as normal.”
Various back pats ensue, ranging from the absurd notion that New Zealanders themselves, apparently unique to every other global citizenry, seemingly became superhuman enough to ‘keep the virus from breaching the border’ to the purposely misleading claims surrounding economics where Godfery hails the ‘14 per cent’ growth of the economy in the third quarter of 2020 following lockdown, despite it falling 10 per cent beforehand during the second quarter.
It’s almost as if allowing people to work and earn a living can help boost the country’s treasury? Not that it made much difference to the inevitable outcome of mass business closures, or record inflation, facts Godfery conveniently leaves out of his fairytale fantasy.
The effects upon finances, it appears, an inconvenient truth for our woke-riddled socialist (one would think he would notice), who carefully avoids the glaring fact that over the course of first-year lockdown restrictions, the world’s collective billionaires enjoyed a $4 trillion boost to their wealth — Pfizer, alone, posting a 61 per cent net profit compared to last year — while poverty rates for the world’s poorest doubled as a direct result of pandemic, no, government-induced hardship.
He doesn’t stop there.
Peppering his article with still-ludicrous assertions that New Zealand’s ‘public health’ officials effectively ‘eliminated’ far ‘deadlier’ strains of Coronavirus such as ‘Delta’, thanks in part to whimsical tap on/tap off lockdown policies — hitting Auckland the hardest — his tone strikes that of someone desperately treading water, so near yet still so very far away from reaching the obvious conclusion that while such hideously oppressive policies may have had an impact on variant longevity (or as various peer-reviewed studies suggest not), they were never going to affect the evolution of the virus’ latest, and more prevalent existence.
Finally returning to his main point that Labour’s MIQ system was a ‘necessary sacrifice’ to ‘protect the population’ as vaccines were developed — and distributed to 90 per cent of the adult masses — Godfery goes on to admit that as things stand ‘the virus is proving no more fatal than the seasonal flu.’
This is a strange observation when one considers the pertinence that ever since a nationwide vaccine campaign took hold, in addition to other measures such as mask mandates (introduced in late January) and ‘traffic light’ ‘safety’ frameworks (before Christmas), a much larger proportion of New Zealanders have been infected, hospitalised, or died, so much so that in February it was reported that New Zealand had the ‘highest [Covid] R number in the world’, that is to say, the highest rate of transmitted infection.
Curiously, however, especially when one remembers PM Ardern’s brash threat (and implementation) of a ‘two-tier society’ to contain the spread of the virus through vax-pass discrimination, alongside her slew of sycophantic (and psychotic) ‘public health experts’ who sinisterly warned the unvaccinated pre-Omicron’s arrival that the variant ‘is coming’, as if it had motives to seek them out most, current evidence suggests otherwise.
Indeed, with 77 per cent of the population now ‘boosted’ and ‘double dosed’, this combination accounts for 86 per cent of all new cases across a seven-day rolling average, while 84 per cent of all new hospitalisations are accountable to this same group.
Such has Kiwi-Covid in fact been a Pandemic of the Vaccinated, instead, that according to the government’s own Ministry of Health data (not including vaccinated under-12s), of 952,697 total cases reported since August 2021, approximately 754,566 of them have been made up of single, double or triple vaccinated recipients, or 79 per cent of the vaccinated population.
In other words, Covid’s most active incubators, who we might assume have (and still are) following the rules the most stringently, have come from the mass-inoculated, yet they remained free to live as they so wished.
Comparatively, others, like those pressured enough to leave their jobs in the health and education sectors due to vaccine mandates (many of whom come from ethnic or poorer communities Guardian types usually opine to support), felt the only dignity they had left was to use their voice in protest — as was their fundamental right — in front of the capital’s parliament.
Protestors, to Godfery, who were merely part of a MSM-dubbed “clown convoy” (because they didn’t think like him) and represented “the sharp end of this ‘do what I want’ attitude”; actions have consequences, the unvaxxed were often told (as if an injection of any kind, not least an experimental one, should be a condition of any employment), despite the vast majority of them simply wanting to work without medical slavery blackmail as the pathway—a medical slavery which, as we have discovered already, continues to hassle the vaccinated the most.
Talk about the unvaccinated’s righteous justification.
“We cannot let these people win”, he concludes, pointing to an astute fear that only a vaccine-pumped hypochondriac could assert; but hold on, Morgan, we were told by the Prime Minister herself that ‘these people’ were just a ‘small minority’, so how could they possibly win?
Labour has suffered a dramatic drop in support in a new political poll
Time to turn to the polls, old chum. It’s true. Actions do have consequences, and we’ll never let you forget them.