Requiescat In Pace: 2020. Although many will be glad to see you gone, you should be remembered as the Remarkable Year of Dishonesty, Duplicity, Hypocrisy and The Madness of Crowds (Illustrated):
Beginning the year badly, and deservedly, behind in the polls due to a peculiar, but entirely predictable, penchant for incompetence a plague would reverse Ardern’s political fortunes, even in the face of her failure to make the right choices at the outset. Indeed in the days following the receipt of advice from our most expert epidemiologists urging the prime minister to close the borders Ms Ardern refused, allowing 10,000+ potential Covid-cases per day to enter the country in the lead-up to her obsession – the Mosquiversary. The only contagion concerning her at that point was a completely different and completely imagined pestilence:
Her media cheer-leaders supported her; ‘Oh’, they said ‘Orange-Man bad. Naughty Drumpf has banned visitors from hither and thither thereafter March 12th, what an idiot’ While Ms Ardern’s response had been much more “low key” (yes, really) “in keeping with the national character”. Lord; how they swooned. Asked why, at the very least, visitors were not being tested for the Kung-flu on arrival Ms Ardern replied the ‘hands-off’ rationale was being driven by the danger “of false positives”. Yes, really.
The late-starting mistake was compounded by an illegal lockdown and unnecessary $100B over-reaction which has cost many tears, many jobs, with more losses to come, many more. All to ‘save’ up to as many as 2,500, but possibly as low as 7 individual lives in the scenario presented to her by epidemiologists, a figure which when wildly and deliberately whipped by hysteria swelled to “80,000”, a figure so completely ridiculous a B-grade schlock-horror movie director would be embarrassed to purport.
Still: 2500 people is a lot, or is it? If you happened to be one of the 2,500 then: yes. But in comparison, and for relative consideration 1300-1400 die every year of, or from the complications of, seasonal flu while 3,000 die every year from ‘adverse events’ in our hospitals – fully half of which are avoidable, that’s 1500 avoidable deaths every year in what is imagined to be the very safest place in New Zealand to be unwell.
But the media and the masses, it seems, alike the artists of ancient Egypt, an empire famous for plagues, simply could not do perspective. So they cowered and cuddled and bubbled and worshipped in the cult of Goddess Jacinda.
Long will she reign, I fear…but try to have a nice new-year anyway, and keep resisting.
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