Dave Witherow: Here Is The News

Doctor Bloomfield, our Voice of Science, has announced he is retiring.

The job as been onerous, he says, and he is looking forward to a more relaxing life and fresh opportunities as an “influencer”.

 Some of us – a small, warped, scientifically-illiterate minority, no doubt – tend to think that Dr Bloomfield has done more than enough influencing already. And not just influencing, which, after all, leaves a bit of wiggle-room for the poor sod being influenced. Coercing, actually, would be a more accurate word for what Dr Bloomfield has been up to. Get injected, show your papers – Herr Doktor Bloomfeld knows all about that.

Dave Witherow: Confederacy of Dunces

Just when you think we have reached peak lunacy, it gets worse. The other day, for example, we had Prof Michael Baker, Otago University’s pre-eminent Doomster, advising us yet again that things are looking grim. The virus is not done yet, he thinks, and until Big Pharma comes up with new gene-bending elixirs we are still seriously in the cactus. There is too much complacency abroad, says the Prof, and the rules need tightening again. We must be forced to become “mask-wearing society”.

Yes Michael, yes. We heard it all the first time. We believed the images of catastrophe in Wuhan. People falling over in the streets and being welded into their apartments. We believed you and Bloomfield and Hipkins. We swallowed everything you told us. We were flattening the curve and leading the world. We were the doughty team of five million who, by “following the Science”, would eliminate the virus. Except, of course, that we didn’t. The virus is back, spreading everywhere and infecting everyone.

The Science – or your version of it anyway - turned out to be a crock.

Guy Hatchard: NZ has run out of money

You may not have noticed this week that our deputy PM Grant Robertson (he who refuses to answer emails about the pandemic because it is nothing to do with him) announced that as things stand there could not be a fourth booster shot. The reason is more revealing—New Zealand has run out of money. 

Covid sure has eaten up the cash. Grant has spent $64 billion on the pandemic so far (before it has even arrived here) and there is nothing left. Our annual health budget is a paltry $20 billion, the $64 billion has been in addition to that. 

So those of you who were thinking and blogging that the unvaccinated were depriving them of hospital beds might like to rethink. Perhaps it is profligate spending on the vaccinated which has led to those long queues for tests and treatments for diseases like cancer (10,500 deaths per year) and heart disease (600 deaths per year and rising). Just 52 people have died of Covid in NZ during the last two years and most of those few left in hospital are double vaccinated.

NZCPR Weekly: Code Red for Health

Dear NZCPR Reader,   

In this week’s NZCPR newsletter we examine the health crisis – both Covid and Jacinda Ardern’s plan to introduce Maori control of health services, our NZCPR Guest Commentator Gary Judd QC explains the health reforms have been designed to benefit Maori at a cost to all other New Zealanders, and our poll asks whether Jacinda Ardern should have sought a mandate from New Zealanders before changing our health system from ‘needs-based’ to ‘race-based’.

*To read the newsletter click HERE.
*To register for the NZCPR Weekly mailing list, click HERE.  

Nick Cater: Tyranny of ineptitude

The exclusion of the unvaccinated from public places cannot be justified on public health grounds unless the object is deterrence through humiliation. 

If that was a rent-a-crowd demonstration in Melbourne on Saturday, you wouldn’t want to be picking up the tab. Attendance estimates are rubbery and memories are short but you would have to go back to February 1967 to find a middle-class revolt of similar size against an intransigent Victorian premier.

Daniel Andrews’ goose is not yet cooked, any more than Henry Bolte’s was when thousands protested outside Pentridge Prison against the hanging of Ronald Ryan. History records that Bolte picked up six more seats at the following election. Yet the protest should serve as a warning to Andrews that even patient, civilly obedient Victorians eventually reach breaking point.

The protests are not limited to Victoria or Australia. Huge demonstrations occurred last weekend in dozens of European cities including Belfast, Rotterdam and Milan. The biggest was in Vienna, which is about to enter another fruitless lockdown despite mount­ing evidence that lockdowns are a sadistic experiment with unintended consequences.

Chris Trotter: Delta’s Week Of Doom

If Jacinda Ardern thought last week was bad, the week ahead promises to be even worse. Sixty community cases of Covid-19, one of the highest daily totals so far recorded in this Delta outbreak, certainly made for a grim beginning.

Making everything worse, is the extraordinary tangle into which the Government has gotten itself. Gone are the days of simple, but inspired, messaging: “Go hard. Go early.” “Stay home. Stay safe.” “Stamp out the virus.” In “To pee or not to pee: A full timeline of the confusing level three bathroom rule”, The Spinoff’s Madeleine Chapman makes excruciating fun of the Government’s messaging disasters.

People hating a government is one thing. What some people hate, other people are almost certain to love. But people laughing derisively at a government, that is something else entirely. Politically, it’s very hard to come back from derisive laughter.

Henry Armstrong: Pathetic Planning, Puerile Politics and the Pandemic

In May last year, as the Covid19 pandemic was becoming established in New Zealand, I penned an article for NZCPR in which I raised a number of issues which, if not already obvious, would soon be seriously confronting us. 

These included issues where ethnic groups took the law into their own hands or claimed the response to Covid was “racist”; issues with contact tracing and privacy; vaccine shortages; border problems and MIQ control; numbers in gatherings exceeding the rules (by certain ethnic groups); and the media adulation being heaped on the Prime Minister following her constant daily TV exposure. 

I warned of the dire consequences of anyone daring to even challenge, much less criticise the government’s Covid response.

Eighteen months later, where are we at?

Sir Bob Jones: NZ’s Elimination Strategy Has Made Our Country the Envy of the World in the Pandemic

New Zealand’s Elimination Strategy Has Made Our Country the Envy of the World in the Pandemic.

The above, a recent opening line in the New Zealand Herald by its Science reporter, Jamie Morton.

Plainly Jamie doesn’t read the foreign press. All year New Zealand has been a laughing stock in the British media over its closed off society and vaccine failures.

The serious media such as the Economist, in articles on dealing with covid has always politely dismissed the New Zealand hermit state approach as essentially infantile, unnecessary and hugely harmful.

Clive Bibby: Lockdowns and Opening Up

My sense is that Kiwis are beginning to recognise the true nature of this administration - particularly the mechanisms that have become standard practice for maintaining control.

History tells us that the modern version of totalitarianism is little different to the previous ones that seized control of countries then set about dismantling all the democratic institutions that underpinned individual freedoms.

The current government has another thing in common with those abusive regimes.

It is the speed with which they have cancelled the civil liberties of any group or association that dares to challenge the validity of their authority.

Shawn Means: Covid19 - Beating Ourselves with a Hammer?

When lightning struck the tree Homer Simpson sheltered under, hefting a sheet of corrugated steel for extra protection, he was inspired. The glowing bough crashing down struck him as a very magical piece of wood, and he should make a bat out of it. Bristling with bent nails after hours of hammering, Homer’s bat testifies to our human gift of improvisation using whatever tools we have like a trusty hammer. Surely, repeatedly whacking a problem with a familiar tool will solve it even if slightly dented and bent in the end.

Our Covid-19 toolbox has grown since March 2020 when the first extraordinary silence of a Level 4 lockdown blanketed New Zealand. Knowledge of the virus and its hazards for the vulnerable expanded considerably in tandem with a stunningly swift rise of vaccines and promising treatments. Yet, after some 18 months with scientists and clinicians furiously testing and trying other tools, New Zealand resorts to the same hammer swung in those first dim days.

Karl du Fresne: Testing the limits of spin

We crossed a significant threshold in the Covid-19 crisis yesterday, and I’m not talking about the number of new cases.

Commenting on the potentially problematical disjunction between current high inoculation rates and dwindling supplies of the Pfizer vaccine, Jacinda Ardern had this to say: “It’s not a matter of running out [of the vaccine], it’s a matter of whether or not we are in a position of where we need to have a little less demand.”

Er, pardon me? I've read this sentence several times and I’m still not sure what it’s supposed to mean, or indeed whether it means anything at all. Communication is normally one of Ardern’s great political strengths, but this statement was, at best, cryptic. At worst it was nonsensical, and I’m wondering whether it’s a sign that the government is almost past pretending it’s in control of the pandemic.

Ross Meurant - Chaos on the Horizon

It has been said that COVID is like a creeping pressure on one’s ability to breath.

It is also said that COVID restrictions on communities are a creeping form of suffocation. Like a python, slowly but surely, strangulation.

A quote from a Hungarian Jew from the documentary, “The Last Days”.

‘People wonder, “How is it that we didn’t do something?”. We didn’t run away, we didn’t hide. Well, things didn’t happen at once. Things happened very slowly. So, each time a new law came out, or a new restriction, we said, “well, just another thing. It will blow over. When we had to wear the yellow star to be outside, we started to worry”.

Is this what we now experience?

Nicholas Kerr: The perils of COVID-zero — manage the endemic

The perils of COVID-zero—how policymakers should manage endemic COVID-19

As the COVID-19 pandemic has evolved and we’ve learned more about the virus, the way we manage it should have evolved as well. From a policymaking perspective, step one is acknowledging that it’s one of many risks we face in life; we need to weigh up all of life’s risks as we decide how to tackle this problem.

Second, it’s important to note that, as we learned early on, COVID’s risks differ dramatically across age deciles and health conditions. At the onset of the pandemic, when we knew little about the coronavirus, it seemed reasonable to adopt a stricter set of blanket policies until we could properly assess risk. However, because risks differ dramatically for those two metrics (age and underlying health conditions), we should design policy approaches that are weighed against the risks that each subset of our population faces.

Peter Dunne: Mismanaging Covid

Last week, all the talk was of the proposed roadmap out of Covid19 – this week we are back into a Level 4 lockdown. I am not opposed to this short, sharp lockdown caused by the outbreak in Auckland of the Delta variant of Covid19. It was necessary and the right thing to do, especially given our embarrassingly low rates of vaccination.

But what I am opposed to is all the sickening hype that has accompanied it. Especially since everything has been so predictable. From the first signs of the emergence of the Delta variant the government should have been fully aware of the inevitable risk to New Zealand, given its capacity for rapid spread and our abysmal approach to rapid community vaccination. When Covid19 Response Minister Hipkins first threatened a “short, sharp lockdown” last week, the government’s planning for such an event should have been in full swing.