Social obligations: No jab, no job, no fun – we can’t force vaccinations, but we can make life very difficult for the unvaccinated
Let’s get this straight.
You can not hold a person down and force an injection into them.
No State that would do that is worth defending.
The pressure to vaccinate is on because Delta will become endemic and we won’t be able to stop it.
This means hospital capacity needs to be urgently upgraded and our vaccination rates must dramatically lift.
So who are the unvaccinated?
My guess is that our true vaccine hesitancy rate is around 20% and I think you can break some of that down into substantial sub clusters.
Jesus is my vaccine evangelical happy clappers
If you think the earth is literally 7000 years old, that dinosaurs are a trick by Satan and that a virgin birthed the manifestation of God upon this dimension, then believing the vaccine has a microchip in it isn’t too much of a hop, skip and a jump. These are about 3% and they will never take the vaccine because it’s a matter of faith. These people are as rational as snake preachers wrangling poisonous serpents as proof of faith.
Under educated white poor people who source news from Facebook
The focus is on Maori and Pacifica without acknowledging a large chunk of the vaccine hesitant are just frightened white poor folk who don’t know what the fuck is going on and are clinging to some crazy shit they’ve seen on Facebook from someone they went to school with. These people are redeemable, they can be reached without patronizing them and they deserve the attempt. 5%
New Age Crystal Warriors
Maybe the oddest mutation of the vaccine hesitant is how the Facebook algorithms linked white supremacists with Qanon with people who believe crystals can heal them. Again, if you think energy waves from new age magic can heal your vibration illness you are going to believe the vaccine makes you magnetic. Surprisingly middle class and well educated. 4%
Qanon antiVaxxers conspiracy crowd + grumpy old goat nitpickers
The Qanon fantasists are the result of Facebook algorithms of insanity, these are cultists who will drink the kool aid. They can’t be reached but luckily I don’t think their numbers are very high – barely 1%, they are loud but tiny.
Likewise the grumpy old goat nitpickers who will hold up every chart on earth to prove their point the whole thing is needless blah blah blah. Sure, you’re an expert in pandemics now, great. These old goats will get the vaccine in the end, they are just resentful they are being told to do something. 1%
Gangs & Homeless & Prisoners
Despite all the attention, all up 1%.
Maori, Pacifica, disabled, poor
I believe a solid quarter of that 20% hesitancy are groups who have little say in the distribution of resources and who pay the highest price in a pandemic. Their disconnect is driven by poverty and the total lack of outreach into their communities. This entire segment of society are approachable and desperate for solutions and simply require political will to provide them.
The real issue is poverty. Most of those who don’t vaccinate come from poor communities and the ability to get immunisation is impacted by that poverty. It is the nature of this deep poverty and inequality that permeates throughout NZ that is the ultimate problem here, not hipster mummy bloggers & Qanon freaks. When you consider that we have 190 000 children living in poverty, the low rate of immunisation can’t be a surprise to anyone can it?
The antiVaxxers, Qanons, religious nutty and the mommy blogger are all very vocal but tiny, the majority are people in poverty who find accessing health care difficult and who are frightened in frightening times.
Getting to 90% vaccination is the goal and getting there requires acknowledgment that battling poverty is the only way to win.
We can get to 90% by reaching out and going to the places they go to and offering vaccinations there.
But what about the others? The disgruntled, the crazy and the down right disagreeable? No jab, no job is already becoming a reality for many businesses and the inability to fly or socialise without a vaccine passport will isolate the rest…
Positive Covid cases see Raglan shake off its ‘anti-vax’
The small Waikato surfer town at the centre of a Covid-19 outbreak is shaking off its anti-vaxxing image with increasing numbers of locals getting the jab.
…there’s a reality here we keep forgetting – all the vaccine ‘hesitant’ have been able to free load off Jacinda’s elimination plan – with Delta becoming endemic, those free loaders have no choice but to get vaccinated or end up as another story of an antiVaxxer in ICU begging others to get vaccinated.
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Poverty is our stain Martyn and Jacinda was supposed to have an enormous bottle of vanish stain remover, instead she holds a $50 million doily over our stain so we are not allowed to see what is happening. All the doily lets us see is the wonderful lives the wealthy are having selling multi million dollar baches to each other in Mount Maunganui or some other mainly white elitist enclave, like where she goes on her holidays in Pauanui.
I believe there is a solid group who dont want an mRNA vaccine plus those with allergy issues. As it stands as best I can tell is that we haven’t made any other options available… Jensen AstraZeneca Novavax Sinopharm etc seems really fucking daft we haven’t got a least one alternate option here…
Hear! Hear! Cricklewood. I am not anti-vax and I believe Covid is a serious health risk. Especially to me but I have serious doubts about this vaccine. Martyn can pump himself full of it if he wants, my choice is to wait.
Have you spoken to a medical proffesional about your doubts of the vaccine?
Should there not be an alternative availble already? Some people are allergic to PEG its commonly used so most people that are allergic already know and surely getting a second option in is worthwhile there are two approved already. If every shot counts get the alternates in didnt take long to organize extra Pfizer shots…
Good enough reasoning, I really wish some of your cohorts used intelligence rather than angry man syndrome.
All good as long as your not moaning while you wait
I heard some criticism of the woman reading the covid TV ads so took notice a number of times the ads appeared. I considered that her audience was likely to cover the full range of human capability and fallibility, the widest range in a socio-economic sense and a range of ethnicities.
I concluded that anyone derailed by what was being presented and how it was being presented, needs to find something serious to get upset about.
Maybe, just maybe, if you are the type that still watches the tripe that free to air television dishes up then the patronising is well aimed.
It’s exactly because of being treated by the industry in that way that I gave up on the medium a decade ago. Kill your television.
When Doctors are as deluded and fucked in the head as the woman in this clip, there is no hope.
She is trained, experienced and been on the planet for a few years. When her words come out what are the simple folk going to do? She is an indication of the shit that has to be pushed, how high the hill is and how slender the prongs of the fork are.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWHZgzWg-1U
You are spot on Peter – great comment and I totally agree with you.
The woman in the youtube clip is the type of troll who gets the buy-in from individuals who search the web for all the conspiracy theories that fit with their own narratives, which in turn have been formed by other conspiracy theories. They reject mainstream media facts and commentary from experts saying these conspiracy theories are misinformation in favour of the actual misinformation that they accept as factual. Like – duh. These people include the ‘grumpy old goat pickers’ MB refers to although I think they number more than 1%. They believe that only older people with underlying health conditions succumb to and die from COVID and that young people including babies don’t. They must subscribe to the Trump theory on COVID and they probably support the views expressed by that clown Brian Tamaki. Unfortunately, they are the bozos who will prevent us reaching the 90% vaccination target yet if they contract COVID they will be the first to demand medical treatment and will be a drain on precious medical resources to the detriment of those people who are more deserving of treatment. Paradoxically, in demanding medical treatment when they contract COVID they contradict and reject the very conspiracy theories they have adopted.
Me and my friends (we’ve all been either fully vaccinated or had the first jab) placed a metal item on all parts of our bodies seeing if it would stick. It didn’t. The only thing the experiment did achieve was we all had a laugh doing it.
How very pale stale male and so old school, Frank. Your not just a little bit racist are you Frank? Give a thought to all those families your lot brought over here to keep our wages down. Probably learning the English language on the fly, so Jacinda has to take that into account. Not everybody is a know-it-all. Besides “The Right” don’t care for these families once they’re here and are serving their greedy capitalist masters.
You forgot to mention, former Kiwis living in Queensland and entitled people living in small NZ towns which attract those into the metaphysical and/or surfing.
The government needs there to be some unvaccinated people so they have someone to blame when more people start dying. It’ll help gloss over the poor border management which allowed the virus in, and their totally incompetent handling of the health system. They have more than a year to upgrade icu and prepare for an outbreak but despite spending billions they have done NOTHING other than hire more bureaucrats. Planning a restructure of the health system and a separate Maori health system whilst in the middle of a pandemic is moronic. They have also given many NZers the impression that the vax is a silver bullet that will keep them safe. Whilst it lowers the chances of death, many double vaxxed are still going to die from this virus but I’m sure Jacinda will spin her way thru that
The vaccination rate for Maori and Pacifica over 65 was tracking well ahead of non maori all the way through until early September relative to non Maori. It has eased off in the last 2 weeks but results reasonable for all 3 groups with non Maori 86% Maori 79.6% and Pacifica 75%
For the 50+ age group Pacifica are leading the pack at 66% non Maori 62% and Maori who were ahead until mid sept have just dropped back a bit to 55% today. While there are differences in the over 50 groups they are not huge difference. These are double dose statistics
The real gap starts showing up in the younger groups first dose. Non Maori 76%, Pacifica 64% Maori 42%. Thats were the targeted effort needs to go
“…there’s a reality here we keep forgetting – all the vaccine ‘hesitant’ have been able to free load off Jacinda’s elimination plan – with Delta becoming endemic, those free loaders have no choice but to get vaccinated or end up as another story of an antiVaxxer in ICU begging others to get vaccinated.”
Talking of freeloading…
In Japan, if someone suicides by jumping in front of a train, their family is sent the bill for the cleanup and business losses from the train stoppage. It’s a suicide prevention strategy.
If someone chooses to become unwell from covid or suicides from covid then maybe they or their surviving family should foot the bill for their hospitalisation and ICU medical care instead of letting them freeload. Preventative medicine is available free of charge. If you freely choose not to use preventative health care then do you have a right to receive free hospital treatment. The anti-vaxxer would be freely choosing to pay for their expensive months/years of medical care or on death choosing to put their family into huge debt. Or they could ask Destiny church to pay the bill.