Covid-19 inquiry: Vaccine mandates ‘undeniably’ eroded trust, harmed some New Zealanders
- The first phase of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Covid-19 responsewill be presented to the Government today
- The Government may not release it until next year, but the inquiry chair says it should be published and acted on immediately
- Among the findings are the impact of vaccine mandates on social cohesion
The reflection on our Covid response is legitimate and important.
We collectively agreed to having the State up in our grills with enormous curtailing of our civil liberties for the common good, there has to be an examination of that post it because as a liberal progressive democracy, our rights and the State’s recognition of those rights is the most important debate.
I welcome the scrutiny that has been put on the process with the first report.
Nice words aside, let’s get real.
The decision to lockdown was driven by the best public health advice with a fixation on public health and protecting everyone.
With .2% dying from those infected, we had one of the lowest death rates for any Western Country.
Jacinda’s leadership saved 20 000 lives, sure, most of them were Boomers who then went on to vote NZFirst, (proving once and for all that no kind deed goes unpunished), but she saved them never the less.
The naked reality is we were not going to kill Grandma and Grandpa, even if they betrayed us by voting for Winston.
Covid was a unique universal event, it impacted all of us.
For some, WFH was a luxury because they lived in lovely middle class homes, so much so it’s become an ongoing perk.
For some, they found out what an ‘Essential Worker’ was, and hypercritically, it didn’t pay well.
For the kids of the abused, they went on Ram Raids.
For those who had the jackboot of Capitalism lifted from their throat for months on end during lockdown, they had the chance to reflect on what actually mattered and they quit their jobs. Only to then beg for those jobs back
It impacted us all.
NZ was unique because we didn’t force citizens the way China did, we patiently explained the situation and the agreed changes we would collectively make.
China was welding doors shut, we asked you to put teddy bears in your window!
Remember, the NZ population complied by 90% to do as we were asked.
That is an enormous amount of faith, and it worked because that’s what a liberal progressive democracy does, it uses the knowledge, explains it to us, and we as well reasoning good buggers agree to it.
We all sacrificed equally in an unequal society and that was Jacinda’s greatest mistake.
She won the Covid war but lost the covid peace.
We all sacrificed so the rebuild should have recognised that and built a sustainable and just base.
Labour didn’t do that, they merely rebuilt back to the same inequality we had rather than do something meaningful with an unprecedented MMP majority.
Let’s go deeper and the root of the problem with the anti-vaxxers and anti-mandate Volk.
No one in NZ was held down against their will and forced an injection!
No one!
With every medication, you have the absolute right of a free willed individual to say no.
But during a once in a century pandemic, the State has an obligation to demand vaccine mandates for workers who might spread the virus. That said, we were hardly asked to storm a beach on Gallipoli were we? For most of us it was ‘stay on the couch’, so let’s tone down the ‘Jacinda was a dictator’ stuff eh?
I stand by the mandates while acknowledging the damage they caused some.
For some of our brothers and sisters, their stance on the vaccine was the very first time in their lives that they felt othered in their own country and it was an intense alienation that has warped them.
We have an antivaxxer on TDB called Pedro who posts the most toxic hate about anyone who supported the mandates and always manages to drag my family members into his frenetic revenge fantasies.
He’s a charmer is our Pedro.
He, like many of his feral CitSov anti vaxxers are always one week away from a mass shooting for the most casual of reasons.
I argued passionately that we needed to de-escalate the Dumb Lives Matter protest at Parliament because while I utterly disagreed with their lists of people they were going to hang, they were impacted by our mandate policy and they had the right to have their pain heard and acknowledged.
Labour refused to do that and Trevor Mallard goaded them into the violence it became.
That 2022 protest didn’t happen in a vacuum, it happened as the cost of living exploded and many on mandates had still not found work.
If we had rebuilt properly after Covid, those peoples economic pain and anxiety would not have been as easily manipulated as they were by disinformation and anger.
Those people are now lost to the Left forever. They have swelled the numbers inside NZF and now act as a genuine political faction while Liz Gun and other Fringe movements still poll 1%.
We have all lost whanau who have disappeared down rabbit holes fed by social media hate algorithms.
The intense loneliness that lockdown generated has mutated into a very damaged and demented understanding of reality that burdens the believer in ways that consumes their entire identity.
That’s what we got wrong with Covid, after everyone sacrificed equally, we only rebuilt the same inequality and loneliness and fear undermined the rest.
Labour won the Covid War and lost the Covid Peace – that’s the lesson.
If a more lethal virus becomes a pandemic, the people will scream to shut down the border just like we did last time, the challenge is to build back better and not allow those anti-mandate people to rot and metastasise into cancer.
Increasingly having independent opinion in a mainstream media environment which mostly echo one another has become more important than ever, so if you value having an independent voice – please donate here.
Many would argue, if it wasn’t for covid, Labour would have struggled to win a second term.
It was their later poor handling of covid that largely cost them the last election.
And it was their poor handling of covid that damaged social cohesion. Leading to a growing distrust in our media and public institutions.
In the first stage, the team of 5 million were largely onboard.
In the second stage, people were now mocked (ie the river of filth) and canceled for holding different views.
It went from the team of 5 million to a us and them.
Labour’s handling of covid planted that seed.
And the mocking and polarisation is still rather prevalent today
The river of filth were treated rather well for a mob that turned up demanding hangings and worse the sexual assult of a baby ,.Do you really think they went there to protest getting a jab?Mandates for nurses police and teachers etc were absolutly needed as I found when admited to hospital at that time .One of my near neighbours, a health worker ,made her free choice not to get the jab and paid the ultimate price of losing her house and life .To suggest that front line people should not be vaccinated is plain foil hat stuff .
The single biggest mistake we made was the now leader of the filth,Winston going on TV everyday telling people that had abandoned NZ to come home and bludge off the rest of us which caused way more infected people bringing the virus back to share .
No, Gordon.
The protesters were not treated well.
You even highlighted that one of your neighbours lost their home as a result, so you should know better than to gaslight.
The large majority were their to protest peacefully. And largely did so till they were smashed and booted out by the police. And even then, only a handful played up compared to the large number initially there.
Nevertheless, thanks for providing an example of the mocking and slurring that’s still rather prevalent today.
If the vaccines did what Jacinda falsely claimed, then you may have had a point. The reality is they weren’t that good at preventing one from catching covid or from spreading it. And for some, they weren’t as safe as widely touted.
Sorry the The Chairman, but with vaccination rates north of 90% I call absolute bullshit on blaming Labour for people now still being idiots
Vaccination rates north of 90% doesn’t mean everyone was happy about receiving the shots.
Mandates played a part in achieving that high percentage.
It was Labour that planted the us vs them seed. And with that approach (compounded with the dissing, mocking and canceling) it’s not really surprising that this is how it played out.
Jacinda can’t come back without being hounded and people are still dissing and mocking each other.
I don’t know how they could see it going any other way. So damn right, the blame lays with Labour.
Absolute rubbish. Loads of people were under no obligation whatsoever to get vaccinated. In fact the non essential work force out number essentials. You sound like a ZB chat bot.
Get real.
Mandates were widely adopted. Due to Labour enabling employers to set workplace vaccine requirements.
Further, The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Covid-19 highlighted vaccine requirements were among the most controversial aspects of the pandemic.
Additionally, as I keep pointing out, it wasn’t just the mandates, it was the way people were poorly treated that compounded the issue.
And that was the approach Labour decided to take
“Covid was a unique universal event”…a unique event that the entire world acted, almost universally the same on. I always found this point – the entire world both acting and speaking in unison – the most eye-catching point of this entire crisis, given that it typically takes all manner of well published meetings and get togethers of political big wigs to get them to agree upon a universal set of measures and language. But not this time! That aside, this shows that it did not matter whom was in office at the time because the entire world sang and danced to the same tune including all opposition parties…with the only quibbles being, not what was said and done, but for how long and from when, these things should have been done from. Of course, this point I am making here I realized, before masking became a component of this crisis and long, long before the big V entered into this equation also. I still find it today, eye watering, how the entire world was able to act, as one. Interesting isn’t it, that the entire world cannot act as one to get rid of war or hunger or poverty. Really farkin interesting that is!
to get the entire world to act in unison, but such coordination, such
Or on climate change
It was war-gamed, AO.
The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hosted Event 201, a high-level pandemic preparedness and response exercise
Oh, I didn’t fully clear the lil box we write in. Stupid me.
Well, TC, I don’t understand how just one health body, that is an offshoot of a private research university, I see, admittedly backed by powerful economic interests, I do not understand how this one body managed to prepare a plan that was soon adopted by all health bodies and all governments of the world. The level of influence, the level of power that this one totally unelected body has/had on the entire world is mind-blowing to say the very least.
Winston Churchill defeated the Nazis, won in wartime for Britain but immediately lost in peace time. He has been labelled a war monger, a racist, a drunkard, a privileged Toff and various other derogatory comments by his detractors. But he beat the Nazis, he won the Battle of Britain, he saved his country from invasion by the fascists.
Eighty years later here in NZ another type of invasion threatened, a Prime Minister halted that invasion and saved many lives albeit with a similar political outcome as Winston Churchill.
You can please all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot please all the people all the time.
Winston Churchill didn’t beat the Nazi’s single handedly, the working class soldiers beat the nazi’s. Nye Bevan outed Churchill and his merry toffs as useless. Thats why they lost that election after the war because the working classes were used and abused as cannon fodder Mandates were essential for health professionals they don’t tell you there are mandates for TB Vaccinations plus hepatitis vaccinations that are ongoing Go to Australia there are many more vaccinations especially in the tropics. The question should have been would you want your relatives looked after by a medical professional who doesn’t believe in research and science, sadly many midwives didn’t. The older person had the biggest uptake of the vaccine so I seriously think it’s not the majority of these who support the cookers .
I never mentioned that Churchill lost the election, rather that he lost in peacetime. Churchill was the man for the times. I am thankful that he was and likewise that we had Jacinda Ardern at the helm during a once in a 100 year global pandemic.
Amazing how every one focuses on the single thing that could have been done differently and ignors all the things we did right 99.9% of the pandemic .Just remember there were no vaccines at the start and also the carnage that was going on in all countries in Europe and the US .
Yet now according to our world in data our cumaltivie covid deaths are now at the world avg. All we did was buy time, at a pretty horrendus cost.
So right Martyn.
That is an enormous amount of faith, and it worked because that’s what a liberal progressive democracy does, it uses the knowledge, explains it to us, and we as well reasoning good buggers agree to it.
We all sacrificed equally in an unequal society and that was Jacinda’s greatest mistake.
She won the Covid war but lost the covid peace.
That was the only outcome. Complying or being ordered to, the people who had been suffering so that the NZ economic books and trading system could seem to work in tune with the expected outcomes and within the invisible threatened hangman’s loop around our necks from the big business and wealth accumulators of the world, was demanding too much from already impacted people surviving at the fringes of being Calcutta street people.
Only Maori togetherness and true nobility was rendering humane assistance to needy Maori and Pasifika, also pakeha, with some religious and personal charity to buffer. I think PM Jacinda flexed her muscle within the political sphere (bubble) that she was in, but was possibly a minority of one one person against the calculating, dead minds of the materialistic, mercenary, acquisitive approach of Labour to any problem, humans merely being part of the ecosystem in which we are material serfs to massive wealth accumulators.
well put
This vid on the intelligent and how hard it is for we general populace to put up with them and their brilliance possibly helps explain why PM Jacinda was not loved after Covid and Siouxsie? either – that pink-haired so and so!
Why Society Hates Intelligence | Schopenhauer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1jRAfi1Op4
We owe respect to PM Jacinda for what she did; think of the long drive shaft between the Beehave, going through numerous functionaries, and into the hands-on deliverers at the coalface. (There is a lot of ‘talk’ along the way. Hah)
And Martyn part of Schopenhauer’s thought might click with you. Trying to bring intelligence and some political experience and understanding to those who need more is not encouraged by those not comfortable with stirring the lees at the bottom of their glass.
This amusing song is the answer to resentment to your intelligent utterings. Let’s celebrate intelligence and/or outstanding gifts with a little tongue in cheek.
1:21 / 3:53
Kenny Rogers & Mac Davis – Hard To Be Humble LIVE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCyYuLQ7_Ws
Poor wee dainty people need to grow a vagina. Not balls, they’re weak and tender. Grow a vagina instead, those things can really take a pounding. RIP Betty White.
If the septic lizard people i.e. luxon, peters and seymour had been in government at the time covid struck we’d still be bulldozing the dead into pits.
I think in many ways Hipkins finds himself in the position Adern found herself in when covid broke loose. He wants to break free but he can’t. The scope and scale of the levels of corruption here are so vast that neither he nor Adern dared to go anywhere near the terrible truth. Given the depravity of greed that’s defined AO/NZ since the formation of the nazional party in 1936 I think Adern and Chip did, and do, a good job of keeping away from the fires of Hell while holding down the job of keeping the Con alive while making sure things appear more or less normal. Which of course they’re not.
However: Mark my words. The toxic di$ea$e that’s de stocking our farm lands and sending our young farmers to Australia or at the very least to the cities will bite hard as fuck when we start to run out of cold hard cash.
That’s when the luxon, the seymour and the peters will do their dirty work and sell us all to foreign investors and that’s luxon’s actual job by the way. He has no interest in being a prime minister. He doesn’t have a personality for it. For anything really. He just does deals. He fakes it until he makes it. He’s a self confessed fake and when the time’s right he’ll simply disappear into obscurity, with our money. He has no interest in our health or well being. Just our money.
We held out for a vaccine and the viral load to evolve – which we did and it did. As the virus was endemic globally, we had two shows of stopping it, no show and shit show. Should have gone back to near normal when Delta started spreading. The genie was out of the bottle and not going back in.
From then on, the onus should have been put on the individual to vaccinate, or not, and to self lock-down/isolate or not. The second lock down and mandates were total over-reach. They should have been ramping up hospital staffing, not attacking it.
Waiting for and punishing hold-outs just pissed everyone off.
There aren’t easy answers except when one is on the outside of the melee (the French have such good language) – commenting from anonymity.
A good description of – Melee
Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Melee
A melee is disorganized hand-to-hand combat in battles fought at close range with little central control once it starts. In military aviation, a mêlée has …
I always chuckle at people who talk about Labour’s poor handling of Covid- particularly right wing ‘business’ people who benefitted most from the Covid handouts (14 -week period), which kept their bullshit businesses (which only survive off tax write-offs) going during the period. Imagine this Government during a pandemic- your grandma/granddad, mother/father wouldn’t have survived due to their laissez faire approach. Health costs too much money, but they are spending billions on new prisons. Interesting how this Government always blame the last one for the ‘current economic situation’, but they never talk about them having to negotiate the pandemic – never! And rather stupidly, Labour never pull them up on this. Chippy was asked for his view on the Governments performance over the last year and he said “ they show moved results”. He is a wimp and he needs to go fast if they have any hope of winning the next election. Labour need to grow a pair and get some mongrel fast because they are constantly blamed for everything to justify the rapidly declining economy due to a grossly incompetent leader and coalition. The coup needs to start real soon, to hoist Keiron as leader- Chippy is useless.
But during a once in a century pandemic, the State has an obligation to demand vaccine mandates for workers who might spread the virus.
The virus was already spreading – those who had taken the vaccine were forced to wait, and those who had no intention to vaccinate were forced to resign. It was the illogic of these decisions, when the outcome was already inevitable, that caused the anger and resentment.
As far as I can see, New Zealand got the COVID response right to start with, but the quality of the response deteriorated over time.
How about next time, just let a bloody virus run rampant. Then we can all wine about the fact we didn’t do anything. At least business will be sweet because apparently people just keep turning up to restaurants and bars etc as people are dying around them.
Yes lots of wine.
But the evening convivial experience would be spoiled by ‘people dying around them’. Damn, that person fell right in my lobster. I’m not paying the bill for this poor service, do you hear; it’s not what I’m used to and a disgrace for this restaurant. Whine. Rant. Now I am beginning to feel queer, coff coff. As the saying goes ‘It’s not the coff that carries you off, It’s the coffin they carry you off in!’
I’m reasonably sure, Martyn, you misspelt metastasise. Ah, right. But then again, I misspelt misspelt.
Anyone brought up on ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ knows ‘metastasize’.
Good essay. These anti-covid folk were born mostly from modern bullshit media. I was going to give Rogernomics a parental role but it is refuted by the ones I know. Ordinary dissatisfaction meets bullshitters. No protection of thought-out ideas.
Madder music. More wine.
More effective than vaccines, which people had and still caught COVID and still spread it were: social distance, masks, hygiene, limited gatherings and numbers of people together.