New Zealand: Mugged by Covid Reality
RAMESH THAKUR AUGUST 13, 2022n the first year of the pandemic, a team from Otago University in New Zealand (my former university) published an interesting study that provided some explanation for the strong public support for lockdown measures. This support came despite known or predicted collateral harms, including loss of livelihoods, elevated mortality from neglect of other diseases and ailments, “deaths of despair” from greater loneliness, and police abuses.
The answer, they said, is the moralization of restrictions in pursuit of a Covid eradication strategy. People did not take kindly even to mere questioning of the restrictions. With many governments, for example the British, deploying state propaganda to the full to instill fear of the disease and shame all effort to question restrictions, the moralization deepened into sacralization.
This offers a plausible explanation for why people who so warmly embrace the moral framework of diversity, inclusion, and tolerance in social policy settings, ended up supporting vaccine apartheid for those hesitant to get jabbed by shots with worryingly thin efficacy and safety trials before approval for public use.
Jacinda Ardern’s government further reinforced New Zealand’s collective moral fervor by proclaiming its doctrine of the health ministry as the “single source of truth” on anything to do with coronavirus, including public health interventions.
With the passage of time, as evidence mounted of the folly of Zero Covid policy and the accumulating harms it was causing, the New Zealand government was trapped in a prison of its own construction and found it difficult to change course, even after the futility of the entire program became obvious in the data. . .
https://brownstone.org/articles/new-zealand-mugged-by-covid-reality/