The Guardian — I read it, so you don’t have to. Believe me, I’m doing you a favour.
There’s no rote-learned “progressive” opinion so dumb that the Guardian won’t print it. But some Guardianista opinion pieces are garnished with just the right touch of idiotic irony when their headline image directly contradicts their whole argument.
You see, the Guardian wants you to believe that the opposition to vaccine mandates and lockdowns is driven solely by loony conspiracy theories. The Grauniad makes sure their readers get all the tut-tutting they need from the get-go, throwing out all right trigger-words: “conspiracy theories”, “5G”, “Bill Gates”, “Jacinda Ardern”.
You get the picture: oh, those nasty, dangerous, lunatic right-wingers. It’s more than enough to set a bougie Greens voter in Ponsonby or Grey Lynn shaking their head over their artisanal muesli and organic soy milk.
It’s also raging bullshit.
Sure, there are plenty of loony conspiracy theorists jumping on the freedom protest bandwagon and attracting journalists like blowies to a ripe cowpat, but, as even the Guardian’s own headline image showed, that’s not what is actually motivating the protests.
Read the sign: “Ur body does not belong to ur employer, school or government!” “No to apartheid communism” (and something about “fish & chips” — presumably a dig at Ardern).
More importantly, the speaker in the picture is Brian Tamaki, who has explicitly stated that, “I am not anti-vaccination. I am simply protective of peoples right to choose for themselves and without inappropriate enticement or threats”. Tamaki has also stated clearly that his protests are motivated by a desire to protect “the entire nation’s freedom of expression, freedom of peaceful assembly, freedom of movement, freedom from discrimination and the right to refuse to undergo medical treatment”.
The Guardian doesn’t even bother addressing the latter arguments at all. It only pays lip-service to opposition to mandates until halfway through the article: only to “rebut” it with a cloud of waffle that, if anything, validates the second protest sign pictured.
Anti-vaxxers – whether Maori or non-Maori – often fall back on their “individual right to choose”. That makes modest sense. Of course it’s your choice whether to take the vaccine or take your chances with the virus. But that language – individual right to choose – strikes as foreign to the Maori world.
Which is exactly the sort of racial separatist, collectivist argument the “No to apartheid communism” sign is protesting.
But even this sort of straw-manning still isn’t stupid enough for the Guardian. Oh, no, not by a long shot.
Stand by for the idiot-icing on the whole stupid-cake:
This is where anti-vaxxers are, to frame it as bluntly, anti-Maori. The 1918 influenza pandemic ripped through Maori communities. According to one estimate Maori were eight times more likely to contract and die from the virus as Pakeha. The anti-vaxxers who in 2021 discourage Maori from taking the vaccine risk repeating this history. If Maori vaccination rates remain as low as they are, and vaccination rates for other groups rapidly approach 90% and above, Covid-19 will become a virus for brown people. In particular, brown children who – in this moment – cannot get the vaccine. In the United States children’s hospitals and paediatric intensive care units are overwhelmed as the virus spreads rapidly through the unvaccinated.
The Guardian
This is nonsense and lies on stilts.
The CCP virus is nothing like the Spanish Flu virus: not in virulence or mortality, and especially not its target demography. There are fewer than one hundred children under 18 hospitalised in the US right now: fewer than 60 of those are under five. Given that we know that only a fraction of covid hospitalisations actually requires intensive care, we can safely say that the Guardian is telling some gigantic porkies.
The CCP virus is unlike the Spanish Flu in almost every way: most especially that Covid is a disease that overwhelmingly affects the very, very old and/or very, very sick. The Spanish Flu, on the other hand, disproportionately affected the young and healthy. Very few people have actually died of covid-19, but with it; on the contrary, people who died in 1918, died of the Spanish Flu and nothing else.
There are many good reasons for people — especially Maori, who generally present a lower standard of health than the rest of the NZ population — to be vaccinated. (Although that is much less true for children, Maori or not, for whom Covid-19 presents a vanishingly small risk.) But that does not justify overriding their bodily autonomy and stripping away their fundamental human rights.
Nor does it justify lying propaganda from the mainstream media.
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