Table of Contents
Marlowe
The second Covid inquiry, following on from a hamstrung first inquiry, orchestrated to simply return a ‘move along now folks’ by the politicians who led the Covid response, is as disappointing as the first.
The disappointment of this Covid inquiry could be a stand in for the disappointment in institutions and the people entrusted to run them. An inquiry ingrained within a public service culture that mixes passive-aggressive timidity with a fear of asking questions that could be interpreted even slightly as conflict. The Covid inquiry was explicitly instructed to not be adversarial in any way.
We already knew before Covid that politicians cannot be trusted and science is not a mute consensus – it is a living, breathing contradiction, with opinions far more frequent than hard facts. In this vein, Covid must have been a last hurrah for a past time – when institutions led trust because only they knew what everyone else didn’t.
But information is no longer held by institutions.
Anyone can find their own information at any time. Information can now show what we’re told to be skewed and twisted. It shows false claims for what they are. And information is the underlying basis for declining institutional trust. We now see through the veil.
Covid had a significantly lower mortality rate than was used in the worst case modelling that was amplified in unison by media and politicians to justify lockdowns and restrictions.
Social distancing ensured schools and workplaces and businesses couldn’t open during lockdowns and then struggled to be able to open during lower levels of restrictions too.
In this backdrop, a Covid inquiry could have stepped in to ask forceful, searing questions.
The inquiry could have forced the politicians (who, unlike us, apparently never looked anything up on the internet for themselves) who led the response, and the experts who advised them to face up and ask exactly why they focused on the worst case rather than the more reasonable case. Did they really look into actual studies to inform themselves? If stopping people from getting the virus was because so many people would need hospital-based medical care – why was improving hospitals never seriously funded in favour of trying to eliminate a virus through shutting down society intermittently and a border for years?
The inquiry didn’t investigate the ethics behind pandemic restrictions, like vaccine passes, mandates and their long-reaching impact on people’s rights and expectations on what it is to live in a democratic society. Banning people without a vaccine pass from cafes, or requiring masks to be worn while entering a restaurant but not sitting, is clearly deranged policy. We can all see this as ludicrous but yet it was never formally questioned.
The inquiry could have looked at the censorship of people who had different opinions, why different perspectives weren’t considered within policy and even asked why on earth a public health institution, the Ministry of Health, had thought they should set up their own censorship bureau to shut down people’s opinions.
It could have asked how experts, politicians and bureaucrats stood in front of a democratic nation to pontificate and impose a truth that was actually false.
But the inquiry didn’t ask much of any of this and then we got a couple of kernels of half-truths that were eagerly pounced upon (as though that would show an inquiry inquired), despite being information that was already known and available for years.
A robust inquiry could have asked why if under-17s had almost zero risk of poor outcomes from Covid they should they be mandated or encouraged to take even one shot? What’s the difference between a 15-year-old taking two shots or one shot or a 25-year-old taking the same – when Covid was known to adversely affect the elderly. Why was money spent on advertising campaigns aimed at increasing uptake of the youngest of people, who least needed a vaccine?
In 2024, Anthony Fauci was asked for the reasons behind the social distancing rules in the US in a House subcommittee and admitted he knew of no study supporting this rule, nor where it came from.
The inquiry stated Auckland was locked down too long. But why was Auckland locked down at all if the underlying basis, social distancing, was demonstrably false and, by the way, double vaccination was already known to not influence transmission in any meaningful way by then?
Mandates and vaccine passes were introduced after the coronavirus had evolved to be less dangerous to people and the fleeting nature of the vaccine’s effectiveness had already been well established overseas (hence the perceived need for boosters). Why could people, of any age, not simply be allowed to choose vaccination?
Perhaps these decisions show the hubris of being internationally celebrated by others, also locked in their own trust spiral with their own institutions, was heady to egos.
No, it was deathly necessary that everyone be locked down and thus deathly necessary that everyone must absolutely get two doses. And if you got celebrated for locking down – the strictest in the world even – then celebration must be inevitable to reach the highest of high vaccination rates too.
A little humility or at least listening by those experts and decision makers would have gone a long way in the aftermath of Covid and especially by an inquiry that could have at least asked questions in public.
Instead we not only didn’t get any real questions into the response, we got refusals by decision makers to be publicly accountable and show up, denials by the one politician left (shakily) standing on what they said they knew on just one aspect in the whole darn mess, and a simpering inquiry that confused output (but we did so many interviews!) with outcome.
The Covid era was a reckoning. It showed us that rights – the basis of our democratic nations – only matter unless someone decides they don’t any more and the reasons for that decision can be side-stepped and not really talked about. The second inquiry is not the outcome of a society that has institutions that rest their authority on trust any longer.
