Although the propaganda exercise that former Covid Minister Chris Hipkins and Former PM Ardern waged for years, and still do, in cahoots with our Mainstream Media, has convinced many Kiwis we beat the world on Covid, for a simple-minded guy like me, when you look up "Our World in Data", it tells a different story. Cumulative confirmed Covid deaths in NZ are a month away from exceeding the global average - and we're already tracking higher than Oceania, which consists of countries in our region of the world, many of them islands like us, and so which had a geographical advantage during the outbreak:
Click to view
Is Our World in Data reputable? One of the people responsible for its development was Sir Tony Atkinson, the world's leading expert on income inequality, who was once brought out to NZ to advise former Labour PM Helen Clark's government on such matters. He was a former colleague of mine at Oxford University and my thesis examiner. The founder of Our World In Data says that "None of it would have been possible without him". Of course, the usual suspects in NZ's Covid propaganda exercise will deny the validity of the above graph, mumble on about "better measures", like "excess mortality" (which they prefer because if you lock everyone up then people are less likely to drown & have accidents during the time they're not able to "live" - a good thing for the likes of Hipkins and Ardern.
What's subject to even more misinformation is Former Finance Minister (and Otago epidemiologists) claims that NZ's world-beating Covid outcomes have gone hand-in-hand with world-beating economic outcomes. Given our economy is one of the worst performing on the planet, in terms of GDP growth, a fact NZ's Main Stream Media cannot bear to report, that idea is most amusing of all. Our stagnant economy, growing at zero when the rest of the world is growing at an average rate of 2-3%, is costing us over $8 billion per annum in lost output (2% of NZ's GDP, which is around $400 billion). That $8 billion per annum could have solved our public health crisis, infrastructure crisis, and saved lives. That's the difference between what economists call "the short run" effect of Ardern-Hipkins-Robertson's policies, and "the long run" effect. Labour deserves to be out of power indefinitely for the destruction it wrought.
Professor Robert MacCulloch holds the Matthew S. Abel Chair of Macroeconomics at Auckland University. He has previously worked at the Reserve Bank, Oxford University, and the London School of Economics. He runs the blog Down to Earth Kiwi from where this article was sourced.
9 comments:
You are absolutely right Professor. And have you noticed how closely our Covid injection rates match our ‘Covid’ death rates?
Yes, I'd been noticing the death rate.The initial vaccine was limited in its effects on the Omicron variant, and that made the vaccine mandates increasingly less popular. As far as I can judge, however, the main reasons for the change are political: the govt worked out that the restrictions of various kinds were unpopular, and released most of them from March 2022 onwards.
That's when the death rate started its major upwards curve. There was considerable Covid-news fatigue, and all parties had begun to look ahead to the elections. I went to Oz in June 2022: when I left Auckland, there was a requirement for those entering / returning to NZ to have a RAT at a supervised facility in the 24 hours before they left. There were obvious logistical problems with this rule, and while I was away, the govt voided it. You were still meant to have two RATs on your return (and most people did). My second RAT showed I had Covid. This was the first and only time I caught it, and I'm in the 65+ age-group. No govt of any stamp has any interest in dealing with Covid, as it's not a vote-winner. So those with Long Covid for example, suffer in silence.
They tried very hard to beat the world with excess deaths.
I had a PCR test, once, it was a condition of leaving N.Z. Negative. Cost me $250.00 or so. Nurse said there was a lot of paperwork in order for it to be done. Whatever. No other test since, no Covid. No vax. No thanx. No Covid, not even one little time.
Anonymous 10.15 must have observed that the sun also rises every day somebody dies from COVID. Now there's an hitherto unreported correlation that somebody needs to look into. Pity the COVID death rate only took off after people were allowed to make their own choice about how to manage their risk of infection. That was called living with COVID I recall. Predictably of course, it also meant dying with COVID, but as some folk commented as they removed their masks, "my body my choice".
A research paper by a University of Sydney lecturer , specializing in misinformation, indicated that 'for the least vaccinated countries in Europe , Bulgaria and Romania , excess mortality appears to be less of an issue'. Raphael Lataster, the researcher found other Western countries besides these two countries were not interested in his research paper.
No doctor in the world should be recommending these shots until there is the minimum requisite data transparency of the health data. The only reason you wouldn't do this is if you knew they were killing people. We are not getting transparency in NZ at all. There is an absolute refusal to analyze time -series cohort summary records.
So anon@3.07 are you suggesting we should have perhaps stayed in lock-down and worn masks forever - in many cases isolated from our loved ones, and all gone broke in the process? Some battles you can win, some you can't, and all of us meantime have to put up with those two certainties in life, death and taxes. I'd rather the latter wasn't quite so high while I remain alive and I much prefer truth to lies.
So this guy is a professor? Really? I thought professors were supposed to be impartial in their work, resistant to stupid buzz word charged terms like mainstream media, and a little less than hysterical like this man is when it comes to political figures.
And also reasonably intelligent, that he clearly isn't. NZ' COVID performance. Try John Hopkins University tables of COVID mortality rates. In early 2022 after lockdowns, social distancing and other precautions NZ was 180th lowest mortality rating of 180 countries - lowest in the world. Currently we are 100th - lower than all other industrialized countries including Australia, Canada, and the model for doing nothing - Sweden. Countries below us were mostly African where COVID had less impact and those with unreliable records.
As the professor's graph shows, the very low death toll started to rise in 2022. And the professor knows exactly why this is ' because he and the other champions of business pressured the government to ease the restrictions. That's because they clearly saw the economy as more important than lives. He is actually a complete hypocrite for claiming Jacinda Ardern and Chris Hipkins are responsible for the increase in deaths when the culprit lies directly in his mirror.
And a final thing the good professor might like to enlighten us about while dishing out blame in the way he has - it is March 2020 - it is certain that a pandemic unlike anything experienced in recent years will hit NZ - could you professor spell out your strategy that would keep NZ's death rate - surely the best measure of success - lower than the 180 '100 in the world that it has been measured as?
Yes, what's often forgotten 4+ years on from the inception of the pandemic is that no-one knew what NZ, let alone the world, was in for. Everyone had to make decisions quickly in the face of ignorance and uncertainty. It would have been scary to be Jacinda Ardern, Chris Hipkins, or Ashley Bloomfield. Ditto if it had been Simon Bridges and Shane Reti. Now we're all experts in hindsight.
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