An update on the NZ covid drama

As of this week, New Zealand has finally worked out that their first lockdown was successful, only because it was a fluke. (Lockdowns have never worked anywhere in the world so far).

This has put the NZ Government in a bit of a pickle, because they originally locked the whole country into a very strict level 4 lockdown because of only one confirmed case of the delta variant.

The MSM (main stream media) have been running horror stories 24/7 on their behalf, which has the majority of the population scared witless. (The Government paid out $55 million to fund the media thru these hard times as long as they behave)

(For the record their have been 2 deaths from the delta variant, a lady in her nineties, and a rather unhealthy guy in his fifties, from a population of 5 million).

This means the Government is having to back down from lockdowns while trying to maintain their credibility, while also praying that the positive case numbers don’t go thru the roof.

In order to justify the abandoning of the lockdown strategy, they are therefore going to insist on an improbably high % of the population been vaccinated. In another words, they will make their problem, the populations problem.

However, they have several problems of their own making. They promised that NZ was at the front of the queue for vaccines, when in reality they weren’t, so the rollout has been slow. They have now resorted to bribes such as free taxi rides or a chance to win a holiday.

Originally, we were told that there needed to be a gap of six weeks between jabs but this has now been reduced to three weeks. This adds to the impression that they are just making up ‘facts’ as they go along.

An actual target hasn’t been said by the Government, which is rather typical these days because then they can’t held to account. 90% has been mentioned by their rather idealistic health expert.

That ‘target’ probably wont happen before Xmas 2021, if ever. The present stats are here.. COVID-19: Vaccine data | Ministry of Health NZ

The end result of all this is dividing the country into the vaxxed vs the unvaxxed.

At this point in time in general, people in their twenties and younger are genuinely scared by the whole experience.

The middle aged are far more pragmatic, and typically only wear a mask to pacify the paranoid ones that walk amongst them.

The older generation which includes the the ‘baby boomers’ generally agree with lockdowns inversely proportional to the state of their health.

In theory, vaccines shouldn’t be an issue, because if your vaccinated, then you have nothing to worry about , and if you didn’t vaccinate, thats your problem.

but now it’s dividing family members and friends, and it’s going to be a big issue if & when the schools reopen.

This is just crazy and I’ve covered this before…The case for vaccinating children – Uncoffined (wordpress.com)

At this point, NZ schoolchildren have been stuck at home for eight weeks. They struggle with a lack of routine, stability and structure. Schools are struggling to get kids motivated to join any zoom meetings. Attendance is typically well below 50%.

If the schools ever reopen this year, teachers are going to have a hard time trying to get the kids focused and get them ready for end of year exams.

An arrow against those covid vaccines

Of all the vaccines I have taken in my life like Tetanus shots, measles, mumps, polio, meningitis, TB shots, etc…
Never have I heard so many lies and deceptions over a vaccine that says I have to wear a mask and socially distance even when fully vaccinated, and that I could still contract or spread the virus even after being fully vaccinated.
Never had to get tested when I was perfectly healthy without any symptoms whatsoever.
Never been bribed by the establishments to take the vaccine in order to win a holiday and/or cash prizes or earn frequent flyer points.
I never had to worry about cardiac issues, neurological disorders, blood clots and sadly more! Didn’t even have to worry about death.
Never was I ever THREATENED by the use of FORCE by the Government, Employers, Police force, and Military for a vaccine as seen overseas.
I was never judged by my friends or relatives if I didn’t take it. I was never discriminated against for travel or other regular services to a point where I could not buy or sell without it.
The vaccines I have listed above never told me I was a bad person for not taking them or for even taking them for that matter.
I have never seen a vaccine that threatened the relationship between my family members and/or close friends to a point of destroying my relationships with them ever.
Never have I seen it used for political gain.
Never seen a vaccine needing 24/7 mass media advertising and promotion on every media outlet known to man.
Then there’s mixing and matching different vaccine brands and being told it’s okay to do it one day and then told the next day to not do it (overseas).
I have never seen a vaccine threaten someone’s livelihood, as well as wipe out their jobs.
Finally, after all the vaccines (jab, shots) I listed above, I have never seen a vaccine like this one that discriminates, divides, and judges a society. So much information is censored, deleted, and removed from the internet and mainstream media!
So many doctors, health care professionals, police and scientists are censored and forbidden to speak out or ask legitimate questions when what is being allowed or not allowed does not make sense! Particularly when it comes from mainstream media.
This is one powerful vaccine! It does all these things above that I have mentioned and yet?

It does NOT do the one thing it is supposed to do!

The history behind the strategy of lockdowns

Shared from nominister.wordpress.com https://nominister.wordpress.com/2021/10/06/lockdowns-a-nightmare-of-imagination/

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the twin towers in the USA in 2001, various experts tried to imagine what form future terrorist attacks might take, and one of the obvious ones was bio-warfare; the introduction of a lethal disease like Ebola. Even then they were a little behind, in that Tom Clancy had already played out that scenario in his 1996 book Executive Orders:

One of the outcomes of this thinking was– the lockdown of the entire society.

Drs. Hatchett and Mecher had proposed that Americans in some places might have to turn back to an approach, self-isolation, first widely employed in the Middle Ages.

How that idea — born out of a request by President George W. Bush to ensure the nation was better prepared for the next contagious disease outbreak — became the heart of the national playbook for responding to a pandemic is one of the untold stories of the coronavirus crisis.

Dr Mecher was an intensive care doctor with no previous expertise in pandemics and DR Hatchett an oncologist (cancer specialist). You’ll love the help they got – from a 14 year old girl:

Laura, with some guidance from her dad, devised a computer simulation that showed how people – family members, co-workers, students in schools, people in social situations – interact. What she discovered was that school kids come in contact with about 140 people a day, more than any other group. Based on that finding, her program showed that in a hypothetical town of 10,000 people, 5,000 would be infected during a pandemic if no measures were taken, but only 500 would be infected if the schools were closed.

She got her name on the CDC (Centers for Disease Control & Prevention) 2006 paper, Targeted Social Distancing Designs for Pandemic Influenza, which is very cool, but the primary authors were not experts in immunology or epidemiology.

This was quickly followed by a 2007 CDC paper, Community Strategy for Pandemic Influenza Mitigation in the United States.

Actual epidemiologists (specialists in diseases) were appalled. None more so than Donald Henderson, a US epidemiologist who had capped his career by training for two years at the Epidemic Intelligence Service of the Communicable Disease Center, before moving to Geneva to head the WHO’s smallpox division. In short, he was one of the world’s leading experts in this area. Together with co-authors Thomas V.Inglesby, epidemiologist Jennifer B. Nuzzo, and physician Tara O’Toole he produced a paper: Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza. You can read the full version at the link, but here’s the key summary:

Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.

Lockdown was not even a real-world epidemiological idea in the first place and showed no actual knowledge of viruses and disease mitigation.

It was originally the combination of Bush-era security experts and a high-school computer-based model that had nothing at all to do with real life, real science, or real medicine. So how is that people like Henderson and other highly trained and experienced experts on epidemics did not prevail in the argument.

The [Bush] administration ultimately sided with the proponents of social distancing and shutdowns — though their victory was little noticed outside of public health circles. Their policy would become the basis for government planning and would be used extensively in simulations used to prepare for pandemics, and in a limited way in 2009 during an outbreak of the influenza called H1N1. Then the coronavirus came, and the plan was put to work across the country for the first time.

Some years later, a reporter would track down one of the authors of the 2007 paper, Rajeev Venkayya, who made the incredible response that, “lockdowns and shelter-in-place were not part of the recommendations.”

Even in 2020, there was fightback from expert epidemiologists, starting with John Ioannidis at Stanford Medical School, who published an article, “A Fiasco in the Making? As the Coronavirus Pandemic Takes Hold, We Are Making Decisions Without Reliable Data.”, in which he argued that while a short-term lockdown might make sense, extended lockdowns could prove worse than the disease, and scientists needed to do more intensive testing to determine the risk.

Another Stanford expert, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, joined with Ioannidis on research and papers and in March this year said that:

“I stand behind my comment that the lockdowns are the single worst public health mistake in the last 100 years. We will be counting the catastrophic health and psychological harms, imposed on nearly every poor person on the face of the earth, for a generation… At the same time, they have not served to control the epidemic in the places where they have been most vigorously imposed. In the US, they have – at best – protected the “non-essential” class from COVID, while exposing the essential working class to the disease. The lockdowns are trickle down epidemiology.”

But incredibly these experts were no longer just overruled. They were viciously attacked, as were many others, as this article notes:

[The Ioannidis 2020] article offered common-sense advice from one of the world’s most frequently cited authorities on the credibility of medical research, but it provoked a furious backlash on Twitter from scientists and journalists.
…
“Scientists whom I respect started acting like warriors who had to subvert the enemy,” he says. “Every paper I’ve written has errors—I’m a scientist, not the pope—but the main conclusions of this one were correct and have withstood the criticism.”
…

Stefan Baral, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins with 350 publications to his name, submitted a critique of lockdowns to more than ten journals and finally gave up—“the first time in my career that I could not get a piece placed anywhere,”

Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard, had a similar experience with his article, early in the pandemic, arguing that resources should be focused on protecting the elderly…. It was a tragically accurate prophecy from one of the leading experts on infectious disease, but Kulldorff couldn’t find a scientific journal or media outlet to accept the article, so he ended up posting it on his own LinkedIn page. “There’s always a certain amount of herd thinking in science,” Kulldorff says, “but I’ve never seen it reach this level. Most of the epidemiologists and other scientists I’ve spoken to in private are against lockdowns, but they’re afraid to speak up.”

Perhaps all these people are fringe nutters? Kulldorff would eventually join with Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford to produce the Great Barrington Declaration. In it they urged officials to shield the elderly by doing more tests of the staff at nursing homes and hospitals, while reopening business and schools for younger people, which would ultimately protect the vulnerable as herd immunity grew among the low-risk population.

They managed to attract attention but not the kind they hoped for. Though tens of thousands of other scientists and doctors went on to sign the declaration, the press caricatured it as a deadly “let it rip” strategy and an “ethical nightmare” from “Covid deniers” and “agents of misinformation.” Google initially shadow-banned it so that the first page of search results for “Great Barrington Declaration” showed only criticism of it (like an article calling it “the work of a climate denial network”) but not the declaration itself. Facebook shut down the scientists’ page for a week for violating unspecified “community standards.”

The traditional strategy for dealing with pandemics was to isolate the infected and protect the most vulnerable, just as Atlas and the Great Barrington scientists recommended. The CDC’s pre-pandemic planning scenarios didn’t recommend extended school closures or any shutdown of businesses even during a plague as deadly as the 1918 Spanish flu.

You can read an extensive list of studies on the failure of lockdowns around the world as of April 21, 2021, here. The Spiked site has a list of nations, lockdowns and their failures. New Zealand is not there yet, but as recent decisions have shown, what happened here in 2020 with the L4 lockdown reducing cases to zero, can only be described as a fluke, and it has failed at its second attempt, just like everywhere else.

As the pandemic fades and the years pass, the arguments over lockdowns will be lengthy and intense, as they should be. But this method should never be used again.

The covid story so far in Australia

The following is shared from Kiwiblog.co.nz

Guest Post: Excessive policing in Australia

A guest post by Gary Lindsay:

I have summarized some but definitely not all of the current excessive policing that is going on in Australia. This article deals only with the actions of the police, and does not deal with the Australian response to Covid, even though the policing is the result of the Covid response. Other than in the conclusion I have refrained from commentary so that the readers may form their own opinions.

Before I start, I would like readers to know that it is difficult to find many references to the current excessive policing in Australia’s mainstream media. The same goes for Facebook and Twitter; they are actively deleting dissent including videos of police brutality, to the point where on the weekend of 18 September Facebook shut down all live streams from Victoria and the Victorian Police attempting to use the state of emergency to enforce a no-fly zone over the CBD to prevent TV helicopters from taking live pictures (this was later ruled illegal in the Supreme Court of Victoria). Alternate media such as Avi Yemini for Rebel Media and many other amateur sources via platforms such as Telegram are the only way to find out what is really going on, along with the occasional article from SBS and the Guardian and some politicians.

July

On 21 June 2021 the government of New South Wales issued a stay-at-home (lockdown) order for the local government areas in the Sydney metropolitan area. Melbourne’s fourth lockdown took place over two weeks in May and June, and a entered its fifth lockdown on 14 July.

The Sydney lockdown was initially due to cases in the wealthier suburbs, but after a few days the focus shifted to Western Sydney LGAs (local government areas) such as Canterbury-Bankstown and Parramatta. Since mid-July much of Sydney’s west has been heavily policed, with mounted police patrolling the area looking for rule breaches and even aerial surveillance. The Australian Defence Force has been brought in to assist police. This heavy and highly visible police action has continued every day and there are no signs of it stopping.

A major rally protesting government overreach was arranged for the weekend of 24 July. This protest went ahead in all Australian cities including Melbourne and Sydney. I watched these protests via live feed on Facebook, and saw thousands of people marching and people generally being well behaved. In Sydney the police began shepherding protesters to barricades near the Town Hall, where a fight broke out between police and protesters. Police released a photograph of a police horse being punched by a protester, with later footage from citizens emerging showing this was clearly the protester fending the horse away from his face. The man was arrested on animal cruelty charges and I do not know whether he is out of prison. In Melbourne the police did not engage with the protesters until the protest began to disperse, when they began rounding up and arresting those left behind.

Melbourne’s fifth lockdown ended on July 27.

August

The government of Victoria issued its sixth lockdown order on the 5 of August, approximately one week after completing the fifth. That evening a group of approximately 2000 protesters marched through the streets of Melbourne, playing cat-and-mouse in an attempt to evade police. There was also a major rally on 6 August during daytime.

During another rally on 11 August Victorian police arrested a man named Marty Focker and charged him with crimes they knew would not stick in court, with the intention of obtaining onerous bail conditions so they could re-arrest him and hold him in prison when he inevitably breached them. Unfortunately for the police involved Marty recorded them discussing the conspiracy on his mobile phone and the footage was sent to Rebel Media.

On 21 August there were more nationwide rallies, including in many regional towns. I personally attended the rally in Brisbane, which was peaceful. Both Sydney and Melbourne suffered from excessive policing, with the rally in Sydney was cancelled at the last minute after the lead organizer was sent to jail for 8 months (for organizing a protest!), 1500 police were deployed in Sydney’s CBD, public transport was shut down, and ride share providers had to ask patrons to prove they were essential workers. In Melbourne the police pursued the rally, and opened fire on protesters using rubber bullets (they’re brutal, and can be lethal), which was the first time this has happened in Australia.

Police in both cities began arresting people for not wearing masks, and sometimes even when they are not breaking the law. Note that they are arresting people, not issuing instant fines. One example is presented in a TikTok which emerged in late August of a father dressed in his running gear, in handcuffs in front of his young child. A passer-by began recording and telling the cops they were out of line, and after several minutes of discussion he was released. Had the good Samaritan kept walking it is likely he would have been imprisoned.

On 31 August a well-known blogger and anti-vax campaigner named Monica Smit was arrested in Melbourne on two counts of incitement. She was offered bail on the condition she shut down her political movement and delete her website. She declined so she was detained in prison for 22 days until the Supreme Court of Victoria granted her bail and set a precedent in the process. She is Australia’s first political prisoner since Pauline Hansen in 2003.

September

More of the same continued into September. On Saturday 18 September major rallies took place. Victoria shut down public transport and Victoria Police searched every vehicle moving in and out of Melbourne. Organisers caught the police unawares by changing the location from the CBD to Fitzroy at the last minute. There was still significant violence from the police, including a 70 year old woman being tackled by multiple officers then sprayed with mace while on the ground.

On 20 September a large group of construction workers gathered out the front of the Melbourne office of their union, the CFMEU, demanding the officials stand up to the mandatory vaccine. The union officials did not, and the Premier called in the counter terror squad. The union officials then began fighting with their own members, with the assistance of police. In retaliation to the protest the Premier shut down construction for at least two weeks.

The following day construction workers protested in Melbourne, shutting down the West Gate Freeway. There were violent scenes as police separated the protest into smaller groups, with one large group ending up at the Shrine of Remembrance. Victoria Police stormed the Shrine and dispersed the crowd, despite the crowd sitting still and being well behaved.

There have been protests in Melbourne met with police violence every day since. An enormous convoy of perhaps 100 police vehicles was videoed travelling through the Melbourne CBD on 22 September, another excessive show of force.

There was another major rally in all major cities on Saturday 25 September, with similar levels of violence in the Melbourne and Sydney rallies and generally peaceful everywhere else.

Not only have the Victorian police been deliberately antagonising protesters, they have become more aggressive towards the public in general. Several videos of incidents where police crash-tackle unsuspecting members of the public, including one at Flinders Street Station where a man was talking with several officers when he was attacked from behind by another officer. There have also been reports of the Victorian Police targeting anyone wearing high vis clothing, because they might be construction workers on their way to a protest.

On Monday 27 September several nurses and healthcare workers risked their careers to attend a rally. Unlike other rallies, everyone was wearing a mask and social distancing, and were in full compliance with the health order. The police still turned up in riot gear and dispersed the crowd. This is particularly noteworthy because people were enjoying the same park doing social distancing the same way but were not dispersed – the only difference is that the gathering on the Monday was political.

Conclusion

The people involved in these rallies and protests are mostly people who are negatively affected by the government policy – the small businesspeople, the newly unemployed (thanks to the Covid response), and more recently tradies. There are also people who are generally concerned about human rights abuses (whether freedom of speech, freedom of choice with the vaccine, just generally against excessive government), as well as those with fringe beliefs who seem to come out when there is a protest for some reason. For the most part the protestors are just ordinary Australians who only want life to go back to how it was in 2019.

Following the protests on 17 September the mainstream media have finally begun to report the police violence, but even now they’re only showing the particularly bad bits such as the woman who got maced on the ground and the man crash tackled at Flinders Street. They have not reported that this has been going on for months, and has been progressively getting worse. They are still using the term “rubber bullets” as if they are Nerf bullets that don’t hurt. As I have been writing this it has occurred to me how much the attitude of the Victorian and NSW governments have towards their citizens has deteriorated since June. It is not something I ever expected to see in this part of the world, in either Australia or New Zealand, and it saddens me to think that a large proportion of my fellow Australians actually believe that this behaviour is acceptable.

Finally, I want to make it very clear that not all of Australia’s policemen are violent thugs. In Queensland, where I live, the average cop is extremely reluctant to police Covid and I have it on good authority that their unofficial policy is to only act when a complaint is received. Even in Sydney and Melbourne the vast majority do not wish to be committing these acts; most do so only because they have debts to pay and kids to raise, and are simply doing what they have to in the hope that this will end soon. If it does not end we may find a significant shortage of labour in the Forces.

Reference Links

July 2021 protests

https://www.rebelnews.com/thousands_descend_on_australian_capital_cities_for_freedom_day

https://www.rebelnews.com/this_is_what_really_happened_at_the_rally_for_freedom_in_melbourne

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jul/09/nsw-police-crackdown-in-south-west-sydney-results-in-eight-fines-for-covid-rule-breaches

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/audio/2021/aug/18/sydneys-suburbs-hardest-hit-by-covid-now-at-breaking-point

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/police-launch-major-operation-targeting-delta-spread-in-south-west-sydney-20210708-p5880d.html

https://t.me/gchristensen/231?single (horsey punch).

http://rebelne.ws/3DC8dCy (police trumping up charges)

August

https://www.rebelnews.com/watch_massive_protest_in_melbourne_as_sixth_snap_lockdown_declared

https://www.rebelnews.com/thousands_march_across_australia_against_lockdowns?fbclid=IwAR0_RvSPkNSPrEiigovzS0lProFEq7FRUIqZ8g2yzo6gJ76rrP1HNwk5HT4