The fear with which people have succumbed to these past two-and-a-half-years of Covid pandemic policy, will be, one suspects for many years to come, insurmountable.
So it still is in New Zealand, a country led all this time by ‘public health experts’ so devoid of proportionality, that it’s any wonder the populace is no longer living under Chinese Communist-style dawn-to-dusk lockdowns.
Let it not be in any doubt whatsoever that if their rotting thrice-boosted arms were anywhere near full-government control, it very much would be.
For almost twelve months this November, the people of these sadly compliant isles, have been subject to living life under a now-infamous ‘traffic-light protection framework’, in which parts of the nation, or as a whole, were moved back and forth at government whim between ‘red’ and ‘orange’ alert levels depending on Covid-19’s risk ratio in any given community.
Despite its now-probable expiration, the country has never been placed in a no-holds-barred ‘green’ for GO live-your-life-as-you-want-to setting, providing stark proof, it might be said, of a long-held establishment distrust of citizens when it comes to the concept of both personal and social responsibility.
It is perhaps because of this invested infantilisation of people that provides some insight into Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party falling even further behind in last month’s most recent political poll, picking up a meagre 33 per cent of the vote behind the National Party’s 37 per cent.
For context, in just two years, Ardern has tanked her party’s popularity from an all-time high during the first act of lockdown in May 2020, to an all-time, stage-exiting low, three months before the end of 2022.
Covid fatigue, it is safe to say, has well and truly caught up to her.
But not to everyone.
Eeeerrrraaaagggghhhh… That noise? What is it? The agonising groans of a millennial myocarditis-marred in-patient? Eeeerrrraaaagggghhhh…
The stomach rumblings of a car-sleeping child, wavering away in poverty having been one of 18,000 children put there by Labour Party pandemic policies?
Good guesses, sure, but no.
That noise you hear is merely the braindead incoherence of the GUCCI glasses-wearing ‘socialist’, Morgan Godfery, a former Labour Party staffer, no less, and knight in shining armour New Zealand never knew it had.
‘Masking up is about protecting our most vulnerable’, he decried, in his response to government proposals to drop all widespread mask-use early next week.
He begins rather speculatively, continuing (as pointed out in a previous piece), to rehash the desperate narrative that ‘zero-Covid’ stratagem was a success story that should never have been cut short. He writes,
‘In the near future historians of the 2020s might mark December 2021 as the end of New Zealand’s world-leading elimination strategy.
For almost two years the country had held Covid-19 at the border, buying precious time for scientists to develop vaccines and for the health system to roll them out.’
Quite. Of course, as we now know, the fantasy of ‘zero-Covid’ elimination policies providing a long-term net-benefit to wider society, is dead.
To take just one brief example of the scores that exist, in the U.K. alone, the healthcare system is now so overwhelmed, not in Covid wards, but in general terms, that a backlog of more than 6.7 million people await National Health Service treatment. That’s where being locked in one’s home to ‘flatten the curve’ gets you.
This is an increase of 2.3 million people since the eve of the pandemic back in March 2020 (and a number far outweighing U.K. Covid deaths), but wholly unsurprising when one considers the culture of fear and fervour pushed on people at the time leading to many millions of missed GP and hospital appointments, including hugely vital early-doors cancer screenings.
Such fear and fervour continues to this day, so much so, that in China — a country continuing to pursue the ‘Covid-elimination’ strategy — that 65 million people across 103 cities and provinces remain in full or partial lockdown.
The cause, you ask? Just 1,552 new cases in a land of 1.4 billion, or, if you prefer percentages, 0.0001 per cent of the total population.
For those still lucky enough to step out of their homes amidst all-day testing, hazmat suits, police drones, food shortages and mass suicides, sceptics of the Chinese-Communist regime have previously warned the world about the government’s nefarious intentions in regard to QR-code ‘tracking’.
An upgrade to what we in the west would know as a ‘vaccine passport’, citizens of the regime now have their daily lives decided by arbitrary QR-code technology.
Obeying an eerily similar ‘traffic-light coding system’ on public transport and other specific venues, a masked-user (obviously) will scan the code with their phone before being shown either a ‘red’ or ‘green’ notification.
Where ‘red’ stands for immediate two-week hotel quarantine (at the very least), ‘green’ means one can continue their commute as permissible only via the app.
It is by sheer and utter luck thanks to our hanging-by-a-tooth western culture and values, in conjunction with our just-about-free ability to critique and question public officials, that our very own pandemic experiences under the boot of government diktat, weren’t allowed to evolve to the extent of the blood-red Chinese Communist Party.
Hack-activists like Morgan Godfery, however, would have you believe seedlings of such extreme policies are achievements worthy of continual celebration and praise; as noted previously, if so-called ‘health experts’ and media types such as him lived in China, too, chances are, they’d still believe all Covid-response protocols put directly in place by pure-bred communist despotism was to ‘protect the most vulnerable’.
It is this kind of spectacular naivety from people whose job it is to question government that has plagued, ironically, New Zealand all along.
Regardless of what has happened elsewhere in the west when it comes to revoking mask mandates and other tight restrictions, proponents of them in New Zealand, so small is the country’s pool of scientific ‘experts’, and so large is its pool of pro-establishment broadcasters, that they have simply been allowed to go unchallenged without any dissenting voices.
‘The science’, aka their science, has simply been allowed to take hold as ‘the truth’.
It is why mask-wearing, especially, represents the last hill to die on for the whimpering deluded masses who cannot bear to fathom life without symbolic gesture, faultlessly detailed in Godfery’s last few sentences,
‘Disabled people have a right to live a public life. They have a right to participate in society…Business leaders are insisting on a return to normality, and the Government might give them their wish. But if “normality” excludes certain communities from society, then “normal” isn’t worth returning to.’
Although Godfery, and many of his ‘legacy media’ colleagues, were staunch supporters of Jacinda Ardern’s on-camera ‘two-tier society’ boast, which absolutely did ‘exclude certain communities from society’, such is the chasm of contradictions and ideological double-standards that drip from their very pores, that this never seemed to be worthy enough of their now-apparent distress for people unable to ‘participate in society’.
It is, lest we forget, far easier to appear like a courteous, decent and ethical person, in far easier, tokenistic ways like mask-wearing, than it is to not only be one, remaining consistent with one’s own views to begin with, but to be someone honest enough to recognise reality and any past mistakes, too.
Before and during the pandemic, for instance, ‘the science’ around mask-use was very clear, summed up perfectly by this Times of Israel article in March 2020 before the majority of initial global lockdowns were implemented.
‘Wearing masks and gloves as a precaution against coronavirus is ineffective, unnecessary for the vast majority of people, and may even spread infections faster, experts said Tuesday.’
The simple truth is, admittedly, that ‘the science’ is always changing, has changed, and will always change. That’s what science is. But to suggest, as Godfery clearly attempts, that it is scientifically critical for wider society to continue wearing masks in perpetuity for the safety and dignity of others, or else be liable for some kind of morally-bankrupt crime, is absurdity at best, and shameful at its very worst.
In the current context of Covid-19 nationwide, the latter seems more pertinent.
Indeed, even despite ‘expert’ concern that fewer people are currently wearing masks in public since the mandate was introduced in January, New Zealand’s hospitalisation and intensive care unit rate is now running at its lowest number in more than six months, tending to provide further evidence, in rebuttal to Godfery’s position, that no extra or additional danger may come to those who fear mask-removal most.
In essence, no greater swathes of disabled or vulnerable people are dying off simply because no-symptom adolescents of an ever-less-severe virus are no longer wearing masks in the noodle aisle at the local PAK’nSAVE.
Whilst much sympathy should be shared with our most vulnerable communities who suffered and were isolated more than anyone, perhaps — undoubtedly becoming fearful of life itself — it is simply not incumbent on the general population, nor compassionate of them, to help affirm an ongoing atmosphere of fear, and certainly not when such fear has been stoked, and brought back from the dead time and time again, by disembodied sunken souls like Morgan Godfery, and his hideous hysterics bubbling from within the bowels of a decaying mainstream corpse.