There’s a lexicon of words that the bought-and-paid-for NZ legacy media have approved for use in relation to Jacinda Ardern and her government. At times, it’s almost as if PIJF funding comes with a literal list of approved adjectives.
Suffice to say that “immoral”, “incoherent” and “a grand failure” would not be on the list.
Yet, those are the very words used by no less an authority than a Stanford University School of Medicine epidemiologist, health economist, and professor.
Now, I’m always chary of arguments from authority: too often, they’re just used to arbitrarily shut down dissent. More importantly, science is a universalist mode of thinking: a layman can say sensible things about physics, just as much as a prize-winning professor can say stupid things about physics. What matters is what is said, not who says it.
But arguments from scientific authority have been de rigeur in Covid policy even more than climate change. “Listen to the experts” has been the go-to mantra for the media-political class. The only problem is that the touted “experts” so often aren’t. What’s Shaun Hendy’s “expertise” in epidemiology, after all?
And which expert would you listen to? A glorified lab tech with ludicrous hair, or a Stanford epidemiologist?
Guess which one is the go-to mouthpiece for the Ardern government Covid policies, and which is a trenchant critic.
Through 2021, the Ardern government boasted that its Covid policies were the best in the world. To the uninformed eye, it might even have appeared true. After all, New Zealand had a remarkably low rate of Covid infections and deaths. Fast forward to 2022, though, and NZ is leading the world in its rates of infections and deaths.
So, what went so wrong?
Firstly, NZ’s supposed “Covid success” was almost entirely an illusion borne of a few brute facts: it’s one of the most isolated countries, with one of the smallest populations, in the world; almost all its international traffic arrives at one airport; and it’s in the southern hemisphere.
Covid likely first arrived in New Zealand in early 2020 – midsummer in the southern hemisphere. Although it can spread out of season, Covid has a seasonal pattern, and winter is its season. If this highly infectious virus had landed on New Zealand’s shores in its winter, the virus would have spread more readily.
Even that illusory success was bought at a prohibitively high price. Not just the bureaucracy bastardry of barring NZ citizens from returning home to see dying family members for the last time, or the delay in essential health services and check-ups which is having a brutal knock-on effect for an already-neglected health system.
The result was that, even absent Covid, New Zealand’s mortality rate rose.
The mortal effect on the economy was also brutal. Tourism, one of the country’s biggest earners, collapsed. By July 2022, inflation was rampant at 7.3%.
Despite the Ardern government’s championing of mass vaccination, it also delayed and bungled even its vaccine rollout.
Ultimately, New Zealand chose a strategy of vaccinating its population for herd immunity rather than a strategy that primarily focused on protecting the vulnerable and rapidly lifting restrictions […]
Unfortunately, New Zealand bet wrongly on the vaccine-induced herd-immunity approach. The problem is that while the vaccine prevents severe disease and death due to Covid, it does not stop the disease from spreading.
Early adopters of the “herd immunity” approach, such as Israel, at least had the excuse of insufficient real-world data to guide their strategy. Ardern and co. had no such excuse. Countries with high levels of vaccination experienced large waves of Covid cases. It was plain that neither vaccination or subsequent boosters did anything to prevent infections.
From this evidence, it was clear that New Zealand’s herd-immunity strategy would inevitably fail. When it finally opened up, it could expect a significant wave of Covid cases, which is precisely what happened.
So, what can we say, after three years of Ardern government Covid policy?
New Zealand delayed and reduced Covid deaths at the expense of increasing deaths from other causes. And then, of course, there are the enormous economic, psychological and additional health costs of lockdown that the population will pay out for over the coming years.
More notably, Ardern, who self-righteously babbles about “international obligations” and “answer[ing] to the world”, chose a brutally selfish approach to Covid: shut out the world and let everyone do the suffering and dying while developing vaccines that NZ could then purchase.
Ultimately, New Zealand’s Zero Covid strategy was immoral, incoherent and a grand failure.
Spiked Online
Which is, ultimately, an indictment on the entire Ardern government.
