Jacinda Ardern is stepping down as New Zealand’s prime minister. In her teary farewell declaration, she glossed over her main contribution to world history: the policy of “Zero COVID.”
She even gave China a run in that race to medical totalitarianism.
Tellingly, the coverage in the Washington Post went through tens of paragraphs — much of it holding her up as some kind of hero for pushing lockdown and vax mandate policies as if they exemplified her fabled “personal style of consensus-based governance” — before explaining the most likely reason for her resignation: “In recent months, Ardern’s broader popularity had begun to slip” and “her party is widely expected to lose this year’s election.”
My, “consensus” sure evaporated fast.
Top-down commands are of course not consensus, which voters tend to figure out sooner or later.
The once toothsome, now merely skeletally toothy, politician leaves in ignominy as “the consensus” about COVID shifts worldwide, as people realize they’ve been had: that the lockdowns didn’t save lives (excess deaths now being a big deal around the world) and the vaccines were problematic at best. From the start.
Ardern is not the only politician who rode the wave of the forced pseudo-consensus on coronavirus only to collapse in defeat. New York Governor Cuomo was the first to suffer that disgrace. There will be many others — not least, perhaps, contenders for the 2024 presidency, Trump and Biden.
Perhaps more important than the fate of any single politician is what scientists and other “experts” are beginning to admit: that the figures of hospitalizations and deaths that spurred much of the panic constituted demonstrable misinformation. Bad data — which of course we realized here early on.
Unfortunately, the media’s “experts” — like CNN’s and WaPo’s go-to gal Dr. Leana Wen — tend not to leave in infamy, despite their complicity in spreading falsities that allowed politicians to wreak so much damage.
That would require, you see, CNN and WaPo to admit they had spread the dreaded “misinformation and disinformation” which they proclaim only others do.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Midjourney and DALL-E2
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