Table of Contents
JL
Information
Opinion
This is part two of an article The BFD published yesterday.
The pandemic was just not pandemic enough to promote the vaccine, so we endured creative skulduggery and the haphazard predictions of the soothsayers.
But none of us should let the crystal ball reveal itself whenever it suits.
Just as she looked to the future and said it would be bad, Jacinda Ardern is looking into the past and saying it would have been so much worse.
In between schmoozing with the world elite in the US and during a BBC interview she felt the need to justify her stringent response to the pandemic.
“We saved thousands of lives,” she said with such theatrical earnestness.
But she really has no possible way to quantify that.
Especially when ignoring the more than 3000 unexplained excess deaths recorded so far this year by the OECD.
A number that dwarfs the 1256 deaths the MOH attributes to Covid as an “underlying cause”.
Back when Delta was just a twinkle in Alpha’s eye, these reprobates needed to convince us of the vaccines merits when, at the time, there was no Covid in the community.
So Ardern formed an unholy reliance with modellers – seers who simply read the tea-leaves at the bottom of the cup.
It’s a complete slap in the face now that the likes of Hipkins have since said that they never put much stock in the modelling.
Especially when the theatrics of Shaun Hendy on the podium’s large screen spoke volumes on how much they utilised them.
At the time of Hendy’s visions, Singapore with 80 per cent vaccination rate was experiencing 11 deaths per day. If we did not reach the 90 per cent threshold, Hendy predicted 60,000 Kiwis hospitalised and a daily death rate exceeding 140.
We’d have been better off using the predictive powers of football world cup sages Paul the Octopus, Nelly the Elephant and Predictaroo the Kangaroo, than Shaun Hendy.
Singapore has 6.2 million people packed into high-rise apartments in a country roughly three quarters the size of the Chatham Islands: we do not.
But these guestimates of Hendy’s will still be all Ardern has to go by when heralding success.
By now this government will know that rising all-cause deaths have easily toppled the numbers who actually died directly as a result of contracting Covid. (An ever decreasing number still to be released.)
The number of unexplained deaths will be heralded as far less than who might have died without the vaccine and ensuing two-and-half-years of maddening mandates and incessant closures.
But they can only rely on, you guessed it, the same cloudy crystal ball that failed us earlier.
In 2020, to get re-elected, Ardern rattled off the “hard and early” mantra when combating Alpha.
This was of course a lie. Tens of thousands signed a petition urging the government to hurry up and close the borders.
Our earliest arrivals were never questioned, tested or quarantined. They wandered aimlessly around the airport, jumped in a bus or taxi and then were trusted to isolate somewhere.
Repeating a similarly deceptive slogan often enough will ensure the masses believe her “achievements” again – if we let it.
When justifying the mandates, border restrictions, MIQ and vaccine passes, we will be told and re-told of the thousands of people these arcane policies saved.
But we must remind Ardern that she has no right to talk of success if she does not take into account the deadly effects of the roll-out on us… in its entirety.
Ardern has no concept of what the outcome would have been if we did not mask up, lockdown or social distance, especially with a rapidly waning virus.
Ardern has no way of saying natural immunity would not have played its part to combat the virus… especially among the healthy and those young enough to combat it.
Ardern is ignorant to the effects on the stats if she had promoted healthier living and the use of existing medicines and invested in the health system not the health administration. (They were so single-minded about protecting the hospitals, they literally shut them down.)
Can Ardern really compare our “successes” with other countries handpicked for greatest effect?
Need we remind her that compared to most we have no land borders and an isolated and relatively healthy population the size of a small European city spread over two sparsely populated islands?
The thousands dying from cancers undiagnosed, untreated illnesses, missed surgeries and suicide should not be forgotten when Ardern calculates “success”.
Excess mortality contributes to the toll of this pandemic. The extent of this is yet to be revealed.
These deaths, often sudden and unexplained, are yet to be defined, yet to be acknowledged and yet to be attributed to any one thing.
This is not over until we say this is over. We have to have an independent inquiry!
One that assures us the cure was not worse than the virus. An inquiry so far removed from Ardern and this Labour government that we can trust it.
One that does not rely wholly on a ouija board.
