The question is hypothetical and refers to money this Government spent on healthcare over the last three years: $61.6 billion on Covid management and $6 billion on healthcare reform over two years.
With a population of around 4.1 million, that’s just over $16,000 for every man, woman and child (including those who can’t decide which gender they are), an awful lot of much-needed healthcare funding per capita.
The government borrowed $67.6 billion which, naturally, has to be paid back.
Was it money well spent?
Anyone wandering around wearing a mask these days will assure you that of course the money was well spent. We were warned tens of thousands of us would die if we didn’t comply with the government’s strategies. If mask wearers didn’t believe that masks work they wouldn’t still be wearing them would they?
I’m not convinced of the effectiveness of the government’s Covid strategies, but don’t just take my word for it.
Take mask-wearing.
The Cochrane Report provides an “authoritative estimate of the value provided by wearing masks during the pandemic: approximately zero.”
How about Covid treatments for those unfortunate enough to catch Covid while waiting for the vaccine rollout, which incidentally, took far too long? Well, and I find this disturbing, in New Zealand no medications were recommended to treat Covid until after the vaccine rollout.
For every other disease, the practice of using repurposed drugs is a common practice, but not for Covid. If you were sick enough to land in hospital you might have been unlucky enough to be placed on a ventilator which is the standard treatment for respiratory disease. Most Covid patients placed on ventilators died.
Patients with COVID-19 pneumonia were more liable to the higher incidence of barotraumas with presence of predisposition and high risk factors. In general, an outstanding bad prognostic outcome and a significantly high mortality rate prevailed in COVID-19 patients associated with mechanically ventilated patients.
NIH
Social distancing? Lockdowns worked of course although they wrecked businesses and simply delayed the inevitable Covid spread until they were lifted, but the arbitrary 1.5-2.0 metre social distancing does not work. The virus spreads through aerosols in the air so it doesn’t matter where you stand. Those stickers on the floor didn’t protect you.
If you don’t know why the vaccines didn’t stop the spread of Covid and why some doctors are worried about the possible future effects of the spike protein and nanoparticles in the body check out NZDSOS or Dr Guy Hatchard.
When New Zealand eventually did prescribe a Covid treatment, it was Remdesivir, which has been found to cause serious kidney damage. This potentially lethal side effect is not considered important enough for the NZ Health Navigator website to disclose under Remdesivir’s side effects.
In hindsight, it is difficult to understand how compliant our politicians, the media and the public were regarding completely new medical territory, and Ian McCrae makes the same argument about Andrew Little’s healthcare reforms.
He doesn’t understand why no one questioned the “government’s unfathomable decision to upend our health system, centralising everything, with officials and consultants running the show“.
McCrae asks why there hasn’t been more scrutiny of the illogical spin and why so many “swallowed this nonsense, hook, line and sinker”.
Little’s reforms were in place nine months ago but instead of improving wait times for specialist care, they worsened. In December 2019 253 people were waiting more than 12 months for their first specialist appointment and by June 2022 this had jumped up astronomically to 4,255 people.
McCrae believes we are heading toward a health crisis of long wait times and “tens of thousands of people experiencing avoidable serious illnesses, significant loss of quality of life or early death”. He is sure that a detailed postmortem of Little’s health reforms will be done in the future. I hope the same can be said of the Labour Government’s failed Covid strategies but will it do anything for public confidence in our health sector, which must be at an all-time low?