No country had vaccinated its citizens by the end of 2020, since no vaccines were available at that time. Former PM Ardern was lauded as a savior, winning a landslide election. Afterward, NZ's Covid response went pear-shaped. Once vaccines became available, NZ became one of the slowest OECD countries to roll them out, being bottom for many months. Here's the picture summarizing NZ's 2021 failure:
Click to view
By June 2021, the above graph shows that whereas nearly 50% of Americans & Europeans had been vaccinated, barely 10% of Kiwis had been. Faced with their failure to protect 90% of the population, former PM Ardern, Covid Minister Hipkins & Health Director Bloomfield freaked out. Their one-trick-pony tool was lock-downs & severe restrictions on civil liberties. Maybe it had worked in 2020, but there was nothing clever about that strategy in 2021 - it was a desperate attempt to undo the mistake of the late vaccine order. This Blog takes satisfaction in publicly disseminating that mistake, as we were one of the first, if not the first, to explain the reasons behind the late order and make a deal of it. DownToEarth.Kiwi is particularly grateful to Sir John Key for quoting from our Blog when he made his 2021 Hermit Kingdom speech that turned opinion against Ardern-Hipkins, ultimately leading to the fall of their government. Back then, Hipkins "slammed former PM Sir John Key’s ideas to transform the country’s pandemic strategy as an insult to New Zealanders". Shortly after, Hipkins himself was forced by events to transform that strategy and reverse course.
There isn't much more to say. As for the future, there's little value in the latest NZ Medical Journal Editorial by Mr Ashley Bloomfield arguing for even more stringent government force, in terms of full mobilization of the security services, for "the next pandemic". The lesson we learnt from Covid was that you can only play the lock-down trick for little over a year. Thereafter, patience wears thin. In the meantime, one must either develop a vaccine oneself, or have entered agreements to purchase them from abroad. The emphasis must be on a light speed roll-out, not snail's pace, which was the Ardern-Hipkins legacy. Bloomfield & colleagues should have learnt the lesson that without effective vaccines, a command-and-control strategy, which he's still promoting, but at more stringent levels, whilst maybe useful for brief periods of time, cannot be regarded as a long-term winning strategy. Should no vaccine become available when "the next pandemic" hits, as he describes it, indefinite lock downs enforced by the Army and Security Services will only lead to civil unrest & conflict. We learnt as much. Shame none of those observations will ever be part of "official" Covid enquiries, at least Labour Party initiated ones.
Click to view
By June 2021, the above graph shows that whereas nearly 50% of Americans & Europeans had been vaccinated, barely 10% of Kiwis had been. Faced with their failure to protect 90% of the population, former PM Ardern, Covid Minister Hipkins & Health Director Bloomfield freaked out. Their one-trick-pony tool was lock-downs & severe restrictions on civil liberties. Maybe it had worked in 2020, but there was nothing clever about that strategy in 2021 - it was a desperate attempt to undo the mistake of the late vaccine order. This Blog takes satisfaction in publicly disseminating that mistake, as we were one of the first, if not the first, to explain the reasons behind the late order and make a deal of it. DownToEarth.Kiwi is particularly grateful to Sir John Key for quoting from our Blog when he made his 2021 Hermit Kingdom speech that turned opinion against Ardern-Hipkins, ultimately leading to the fall of their government. Back then, Hipkins "slammed former PM Sir John Key’s ideas to transform the country’s pandemic strategy as an insult to New Zealanders". Shortly after, Hipkins himself was forced by events to transform that strategy and reverse course.
There isn't much more to say. As for the future, there's little value in the latest NZ Medical Journal Editorial by Mr Ashley Bloomfield arguing for even more stringent government force, in terms of full mobilization of the security services, for "the next pandemic". The lesson we learnt from Covid was that you can only play the lock-down trick for little over a year. Thereafter, patience wears thin. In the meantime, one must either develop a vaccine oneself, or have entered agreements to purchase them from abroad. The emphasis must be on a light speed roll-out, not snail's pace, which was the Ardern-Hipkins legacy. Bloomfield & colleagues should have learnt the lesson that without effective vaccines, a command-and-control strategy, which he's still promoting, but at more stringent levels, whilst maybe useful for brief periods of time, cannot be regarded as a long-term winning strategy. Should no vaccine become available when "the next pandemic" hits, as he describes it, indefinite lock downs enforced by the Army and Security Services will only lead to civil unrest & conflict. We learnt as much. Shame none of those observations will ever be part of "official" Covid enquiries, at least Labour Party initiated ones.
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.
11 comments:
The "Covid measures" had about as much to do with public health as "climate change mitigation" has to do with climate. That is, almost nothing.
These are both intended as, with little exception, global, all-of-society transformations to how people live and how they are controlled. In both cases, the powers that be cannot just impose these things for the actual reasons they want to, which is the stripping of individual agency, the introduction panopticon monitoring grid, social credit systems and hyper-control of the population by other means - that would all be too obvious.
So, they need pretexts (albeit flimsy pretexts that don't stand up to serious scrutiny). Therefore, "if you don't do as we say your granny will die" and "and if you don't do as we say, your grandkids will inhabit a barren desert landscape" are the emotive ideas, again unsupported by reality, that are used to herd people in the desired direction and to accept the desired social, economic and political paradigm.
So, actually, it is an insult to any thinking and observant person to hold a "Covid inquiry" as if the thing was actually about health rather than as I have just characterised it.
There was & amazingly in some quarters still is an assumption that the vaccine would be effective.
As we can now clearly see & supported by what is now many many studies that the vaccine wasn’t effective or as it turns out “safe”
Now to push that on the citizens with nearly the full power of the state is the real issue. Especially when they knew it wasn’t effective or safe!
It was these lies and hypocrisy that brought down the Ardern government & not a moment too soon
As stated by Professor Robert MacCulloch, in doing nothing, it was clearly more effective and sadly a whole lot safer. The increase in infections and deaths is testament to that and coincides with the vaccine rollouts. Stop trying to hide the truth.
But to achieve what Madame Blavatsky so artfully said, to go through the whole charade, was extremely important to achieve the desired paradigm shift and it also enriched so many in the know, including J.A. and all this huge fortune comes from our and our future generations potential to prosper.
The crime of not just the century but of all times.
OK, my conspiracy theory friends weren't at morning coffee today, so I wondered whether this comment section might be the place to come... My recollection is that the real turn against the then-govt came in the summer after the vaccination drive (2021-22), with the frustrating traffic-light system, and then the mandates. The vaccine seemed not to curtail the spread of the Omicron variant, which arrived in summer, so that the mandates seemed to make little sense. I'm taking it that the current govt is planning to release both inquiry reports simultaneously early in 2026, because the second one will likely be more negative about the former govt, and 2026 is an election year. This may be a conspiracy theory of mine - but hey, Brooke van Velden took a swipe at vaccine mandates in the House a few days ago, so she may well have those inquiries in mind.
This blog should have the ability to uptick comments because the above are all worthy of several upticks.......
Madam B is spot on here, I am always amazed when obviously intelligent people (I.m looking at you prof) seem entirely clueless about our Covid experience.
I agree with the three first contributors. The book ' The Pfizer Papers : Crimes Against Humanity " has been released , edited by Naomi Wolf and including the results of the scrutiny of 100s of thousands of Pfizer documents by experts in many areas of medicine and media etc. It is for sale on Amazon and other sites. Waikanae Watch Saturday 19th Oct has an article on this illustrating the horror of Pfizer's determination to sell its ineffective and deadly vaccine for covid which was considered by some researchers not to have been a pandemic at all. Pfizer had intended , these very revealing papers about its unscrupulous and unethical behaviour, were not to be publicized for about 20 years but a court judge overruled them and thank goodness , the truth has come out so we can learn and avoid such a monstrous
scam happening again. No, Bloomfield lock downs were not necessary.
I've been reading Madame B's kind of stuff for years now, and it's still not convincing. But at least people have stopped urging others in caps 'TO DO SOME RESEARCH', and going on to link to ranty fringe talk-show hosts in the US.
It is hard to know what to make of this book The Pfizer Papers : Crimes Against Humanity - she used volunteers to review the Pfizer data - we cannot be certain these volunteers had the education or capacity to analyse these data reports or that they did not have a bias or were even objective and neutral. They may have been, but who else spends weeks and months on something as a volunteer? The key point to retain is that doctors and nurses giving this vaccine to their patients would never, ever have been silenced, if they saw significant problems in their patients following a vaccine. You cannot silence them. The fact that Steve Bannon helped her is a negative in my view - he has a well known agenda (tear down, discredit the government / state). The business model of Pfizer is ultimately to make money for its shareholders, so I am inclined to agree corners could have been cut. However even if you give Aspirin to the number of people given the vaccine the number of AEs would have been as much or more. Likely the truth is somewhere between what we were told, i.e. the vaccine was “safe and effective,” and the vaccine being responsible for 'crimes against humanity'. This book is not the last word. And what about the other vaccine makers?
Again I ask - why were 11,000 kiwi medical people exempted from the vaccine while the rest of were more or less compelled to be jabbed ?
Did this 11,000 have the inside knowledge that is only now being released to the public ?
I understand the great difficulty people have in grasping the counter arguments to the govt. narrative on covid.
I have an advantage in having been involved in the front line fighting in the 'Reading Wars' for over 50 years in Kapiti. ( phonics vs Whole Language' (WL))
Governments can turn rogue and force wrong on citizens. The Ministry of Ed. and academia supported by government were hellbent on pushing WL and stamping out all opposition to it. From my perspective I see parallels with vaccines. Teachers were threatened with job loss if they didn't toe the party line and applaud WL. They were also ostracized in the staff room and demoted. Schools lost funding if they showed favour towards phonics . Journalists also were threatened with job loss in Kapiti. Children were bullied, frightened and excluded in programmes over the issue at schools and parents were threatened with being reported to the Ministry. Parents , teachers and even students could plainly see WL caused an unacceptable level of failure in reading but still this wrong method was forced on schools for over 40 years. In fact we still have it despite mountains of research condemning it.
I disagree with Anon 12:10AM that there aren't people with an active conscience and desire for the truth to the extent of sacrificing themselves for an important cause. Although 11,000 medical personal in NZ acquired vaccine exemptions for themselves, on condition they shut-up about it, there were also a number who lost their jobs rather than be jabbed or to jab. Some specialists did advise patients against it. With a mortgage and a family I consider these people to be heroes not confused by so called disinformation.
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