New Zealand: Mugged By Covid Reality

In the first year of the pandemic, a team from Otago University in New Zealand published an interesting study that provided some explanation for the strong public support for lockdown measures.

• 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.
• 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.
• 1. Initially, New Zealand attained extraordinarily successful results in keeping Covid under control and was widely lauded – by Anthony Fauci, ABC in Australia, the Guardian, NPR, the New York Times – as a model for hardline policy under decisive leadership (read: in contrast to Bad Orange Man who lived in a white house somewhere in Washington, DC).
  2. 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.
  3. To be fair, though, by this date Australia still had a Covid death toll only about one-fifth to one-sixth, and New Zealand between one-seventh to one-ninth, of the European, British and American figures (Figure 3).
  4. While Covid can infect people in all seasons, it is mostly a winter virus and this gave New Zealand much more of a warning time than was available to Europe and North America.
  5. In combination with domestic isolation requirements, the prolonged strict border control measures kept New Zealand’s Covid mortality down to around fifty until the end of 2021 (Figure 1).
  6. The same seems to have been true of the vast human rights machinery that has grown up in every democratic society that kept prudently quiet rather than confront the unchecked power of the administrative state as it rode roughshod over long-established individual rights vis-à-vis the state.

https://brownstone.org/articles/new-zealand-mugged-by-covid-reality/