“A reader writes”
(name supplied)
It is completely illogical that we “never did anything” about the seasonal flu – not even report statistics in the media - and yet with Covid, we have done so much, including turning a blind eye to non-Covid mortality that ultimately in aggregate years of life lost will surely exceed the worst that Covid might have done. Apart from the direct impacts of “Covid mitigation” on many non-Covid forms of mortality, many people argue that worrying about “the economy” is a harsh utilitarian position “because the issue is the economy versus lives”. But “the economy” is lives too, especially in the future; we have made ourselves so much poorer that our choices of what we can fund will be tragically constrained for decades. We had a major problem with economic illiteracy showing up in numerous policy areas well before we needed to weigh up what is an appropriate pandemic response.
By late March 2020, we knew that Covid was overall around twice as bad as the seasonal flu. The impact in mortality was also distributed differently so that it was much more than twice as bad as the seasonal flu for the elderly in rest homes; about the same as seasonal flu for the elderly not in rest homes; and evermore less deadly than the seasonal flu in lower and lower age groups.
Furthermore, various illnesses kill many more children per year than Covid does, even while Covid was at its peak. RSV for example is another virus that has been too tricky to develop a vaccine for in the past, and yet all the hysteria about rushing into an unproven (in the long term) jab for a tricky virus in children, has been for Covid, which children are not dying of, while RSV remains just part of “the normal state of things that we live with” if and when it kills tens of infants in NZ in a mere few weeks.
It is absolutely logical to vaccinate all children against something like measles because measles does kill children en mass and there is vanishingly low risk from the measles vaccine, which had years of development and safety testing, based on knowledge dating back to Louis Pasteur. In fact, measles still does kill seven-figure numbers of children per year in the world but all the focus of comfortable wealthy societies is on mortality from another respiratory illness that is killing their people at an average age of 82.
So wherever did “sense of proportion” go with Covid and the mitigation policies “popularly demanded”?
And it is completely absurd to not now regard Covid risk as having been mitigated down to a level where Covid ranks below everything else about which we “do nothing”. Do people not regard a 90% vaccination rate as having reduced the risks down to below a level at which we’d normally “do nothing”?
The position of “the hysterical” is illogically circular in that while vaccinated themselves, and their own loved ones in at-risk groups likewise vaccinated –their position of hysteria is unconsciously founded on an underlying assumption that the vaccines haven’t made much difference. Otherwise why the hysteria and invective? Yet how on earth can “vaccine mandates on the rema
ining few holdouts” be “the solution” that finally calms them down? If the vaccines work, then we are long since in a position where the risk level is down to “where we do nothing”. We were doing far too much anyway to start with.
I am saying now after too many months of this, that there is a fine line between being merely illogical and being an evil person. Logic is logic; if you just listened to it you have to understand it unless you are willfully shutting your mind to it. If you reject it, you are rejecting truth in about as concrete a concept of abstract truth as it is possible to have. Being unsure about “something that happened” about which different people are saying different things when there isn’t clear enough evidence for unanimous consent, is one thing. But logic is not disputable. On the hysterical person’s own grounds, they are contradicting themselves in the process by which they are persecuting others or consenting to that persecution, including in polls that embolden politicians who are similarly illogical and evil. Rejecting the argument that points this out, makes one a deliberate rejecter of truth, which cannot place one in the category of “a good person who is just mistaken this time”.
I am saying now after too many months of this, that there is a fine line between being merely illogical and being an evil person.
There is also that famous old saying, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Seeing we have been lied to so many times, what kind of character continues to believe in the liar's constant fall-back positions and excuses? If they claim it is excusable that they got it wrong about “the vaccines” ending the crisis and getting us back to normal, are they also implying that we should be prepared to excuse them for anything they will yet be proven to be wrong about, such as the safety of the vaccines? Look, they had no assurances from the vaccine manufacturers to justify their certainty in the public eye in the first place. The vaccine manufacturers are saying, and the smart-arses among the “knowledgeable” alarmists are saying, “Hey, it was never reasonable to expect these vaccines to actually end the pandemic. We always understood that they might not stop transmission and that their effectiveness might wane”.
Well if they knew this, they also knew there was no logical or moral basis for mandates in the first place. NZ is actually lagging considerably behind the rest of the world, with our politicians and officials still sticking to original lies that almost everywhere else in the world have been abandoned in favour of fall-back positions and excuses about what really should be expected of the vaccines.
There is some proportion of people now, hopefully growing, who might have just gone with the flow, who will be very disgruntled because of the obviousness now of the lies when “the vaccine” was sold to us – a high refusal rate for “boosters” is an indication of things being thought through logically, perhaps for the first time. They told us “90% double vaxxed and we go back to normal”. They lied. They had no promises even from the vaccines manufacturers that supported such a stance. There is simply too much out there now that fails the test of logic, for anyone to be excusable for the evil they are supporting still.
On the other hand, experts who have been marginalized and smeared but proven right by events, absolutely should be brought in from the cold. Professor John Gibson of Waikato University, for example, has some devastating statistical analysis of vaccine effectiveness going by the correlations – or the absence of them – in data from more than 30 countries. Even the fall-back position of the vaccine pushers, that the vaccines “wane” and “booster shots” are the solution, is not statistically supportable. The spread of the virus correlates with Google mobility data irrespective of the proportion of the population vaccinated, or the timing thereof. This suggests they might not work at all, and the “waning effectiveness” is merely people starting to get out again and actually putting the vaccine's effectiveness to the test after weeks or months locked up.
They told us “90% double vaxxed and we go back to normal”. They lied.
Continued suppressing and de-platforming of true experts with important insights, is another clamouring alarm bell that what we are dealing with is evil, not just officials in positions disastrously disconnected from their competence level “making forced mistakes under the pressure of crisis”. These people’s resignations should have been on the table months ago if they had a shred of honour; then we could have accepted excuses of pressure along with inadequate qualifications for their role (which raises serious issues about the processes by which they are appointed). Even if they are just trying to save face and doubling down hoping the accusations will fade away, this is a vice that renders them untrustworthy on anything, now and forever. But there are far worse potential explanations that look more and more likely, and even if they are unfounded, it is reckless for government to perpetuate the obvious bad faith that gives these explanations an appearance of “possibility”.