New Zealand Covid Response Minister Concedes Zero-Covid Policy No Longer Viable Following Delta Outbreak
Who could’ve predicted this? New Zealand’s “zero-Covid” policy hasn’t succeeded in suppressing the virus, as an outbreak of the Delta variant continues to spread across the country. Even Chris Hipkins, the NZ COVID-19 Response Minister, has said the elimination strategy may need to be rethought. The Journal, an Irish newspaper, has more.
Hipkins reported a further 21 cases in a virus cluster that emerged in Auckland last week, ending a six-month run of no local cases and sparking a national lockdown.
Hipkins said Delta’s highly transmissible nature was making this outbreak more difficult to contain than others, raising “big questions” about the elimination strategy.
“The scale of infectiousness and the speed at which the virus has spread is something that, despite all the best preparations in the world, has put our system under strain,” he told TVNZ.
New Zealand’s widely praised COVID-19 response – which has resulted in just 26 deaths in a population of five million – centres on eliminating the virus from the community.
It has relied on strict border controls backed by hard lockdowns when any cases do slip through, but Hipkins said Delta may force a rethink.
“(Delta’s) like nothing we’ve dealt with before in this pandemic,” he said. “It does change everything, it means that all of our existing preparations begin to look less adequate and raises some pretty big questions about the future of our long-term plans.”
Neighbouring Australia has also pursued a “Covid zero” strategy and been similarly frustrated as its Delta cases continue to spike.
Worth reading in full.
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they’ve still got time to do a let it rip/protect the vulnerable strategy
I expect they won’t though
I think Ardern is getting adulation from (some) people, not because of keeping covid cases and deaths low but because she has had the most extreme and authoritarian reaction to the virus – which shows how much she ‘cares’. So she will carry on the policy
Nah, She’s a Schwab “Young Leader”
pre-programmed to destroy democracy from within.
Spot on!
Yep. She’s been primed for this role for at least the last 15 years or so!
“New Zealand’s widely praised covid response”
I suspect just as many people think it’s a totally bonkers response!
Its interesting that Swedens widely condemned covid response was infinitely more effective
“New Zealand’s widely praised COVID-19 response”
By whom? North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela?
China!
Anyone in government or the media with strong authoritarian tendencies.
So all of them…
She gave Dan Andrews a high water mark to surpass, but other than that…
Fascists everywhere.
Whatever they decide to do, you can bet they won’t give up their self-appointed powers, now the country is a totalitarian dictatorship
Clowns
Now there’s a face I could never get tired of slapping. She should be tried for treason!
she is an absolute monster
I must not feel smug. I must not feel schadenfreude. I must not feel smug. I must not ….. oh, f**k it.
It couldn’t have happened to a nicer, more caring government.
I feel justified – it took an enourmous amount of courage to go against the government narrative – to not wear a mask when everyone else was – and now with the vaccines it still hasn’t ended. Since day one I knew it was all codswallop – not because I thought I was invincible to deadly viruses or anything like that – if this was really a deadly virus I would have obeyed all the rules, worn the masks and had the jabs – but because I did my research and I didn’t accept everything the msm told me the conclusion I come to was that I was being lied to – unless you were very elderly with a number serious underlying health problems this was not the deadly virus we were being told it was – in fact the fatality rate was almost on par with a severe case of flu, so I never wore a mask, I never social distanced (unless they wanted to) and I will never have the jab for the simple reason that if it was all bollocks back then there is a very good chance that its all still all bollocks now … if… Read more »
Quite an eloquent way of saying “we fucked up and it’s clearly not sustainable”.
I thought Saint Nicola was bad but Saint Jacinda is even worse.
Both are horrific.
Maybe they’ve had a little look over in Aus or France at their future..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD5-1Z1LXeU
Ardern has a BSc in Communications Studies.
I bet she is genuinely surprised she can’t defeat covid by making those stupid heart gestures with her hands. In her rage she has stripped the entire country of their human rights. What a twat
I really hate those stupid heart gestures.
I don’t think anyone I respect praised their handling at all. It was always ridiculous to close borders and have edit plan. It kicked the. An down the road and was always going to end up being changed.
I don’t care what anyone says but Sweden are the only country that played this well. Yes they made mistakes, which they admitted to. But mostly they did the correct thing…they stuck to their plan, the one we had and ditched.
We did not ditch “our pandemic plan.” The puppets at the top were given a new set of orders and were told to implement the horrendous strategies of the last eighteen months.
It is as simple as that.
We are living under an early days dictatorship with a pitiful puppet government.
Looks as if Delta is giving them the chance of an exit strategy. I suspect they have been praying for something like that so that their U-turn doesn’t look quite as pathetic!
Yup. How’s the NZ economy doing with no tourism, by the way?
It was an insane policy to begin with and now one of the biggest monumental failures in the history of the western world – a lunatic policy driven by a narcissistic leader with a messiah complex who thought she could defeat a mutating microscopic virus and convinced the rest of the country that she could too.
In the words of Derek Trotter … What a plonker!
But if the policies she adopted were meant to test totalitarianism, they’ve shown success.
The vaccines are done! The short term risk profile is off the charts. We have no idea of the long term effects, but evidence suggests it won’t be good. To us critical thinkers it’s becoming more and more obvious that these gene therapies, short term and immediate reactions and deaths put to one side, attenuate the innate immune system, are the progenitor of variants and don’t prevent infection, transmission, hospitilisation or serious symptoms. They are an unmitigated disaster. But it was never about the vaccine.
Seems to me that the mRNA technology is actually pretty interesting …… as a way to deliver treatment to people who are ill (like, cystic fibrosis perhaps, where you need to persuade the body to do something that it should do, but is not). But as a way to deliver a “vaccine” to a healthy person: NOT.
Yes. Very interesting indeed and should be pursued. But not tested on the World population for a single S1 spike protein receptor, ignoring S2 and the viral body load. A recipe for disaster. Those countries that ran with this warp speed will be poorly judged in time. Where’s Novavax? Where’s Ivermectin?
The vaccines are Done!
I guess now they have conditioned a large majority of their population they can do whatever they want now. The boot will not be lifted from their throats.
Has the social experiment failed?
It’s failing. Stay strong.
The evil stupidity of the leftist “activist”:
“Actor and activist Sean Penn says he believes Covid-19 vaccinations should be mandatory.
“You can’t go around pointing a gun in somebody’s face, which is what it is when people are unvaccinated,””
https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1429076616186109958
He, however, can, with complete impunity, point a poison- laden needle at somebody’s face.
Being a leftist means never having to say you’re sorry…
“Completely harmless, but it scares me”?
Evil, stupid or opportunist? Anyway, the kind of stuff that happens when you spread hysterical fear propaganda and pretend there’s an “emergency”.
Rescue dogs shot dead by NSW council due to COVID-19 restrictions
“OLG has been informed that the council decided to take this course of action to protect its employees and community, including vulnerable Aboriginal populations, from the risk of COVID-19 transmission,”
Is there anything more contemptible than an institution playing the pathetic race card to try to deflect blame from its own misbehaviour?
They’ll be shooting their population shortly.
The chickens are starting to come home to roost.
The genie is out of the bottle now folks. Keep your nerve and watch these crooks go down, one by one…
In other news, my hometown was buzzing today and thousands were out enjoying the sunshine and not a mask to be seen.
I was in a garden centre today. About 50% of people in there were still wearing masks. One guy I saw a couple of times put his mask on when walking around but put it down when sitting on the garden furniture to look at his phone…
Was Jacinda a ‘Blair’s babe’? explains a lot
There seems to be an assumption that this is a precursor to taking a more sensible approach if they can find a way to do so. However it seems to me to lay the ground for a much tougher approach than has hithertoo been taken. Think curfews, QR codes to leave the house, closing construction & other ‘non-essential’ work outside the home, banning exercise & dog walking, army checkpoints, shutting down most public transport, no click & collect or home delivery for anything ‘non-essential’.
Arden will just have to come up with an alternative strategy to fulfil her megalomania.
And she will.
Just like Sturgeon, Johnson, Biden and the rest of the ultra leftist shapeshifters.
A zero sum game, as they are now finding out the hard way.
They went all-in on a 100% sterile immunity providing vaccine, a reckless and idiotic bet.
Lockdowns delay, they don’t prevent- see Kulldorff&co.
Now, they are also full of dry tinder, of course.
As Tegnell said last year, in the end he wouldn’t be surprised if we all had the same fatality rates, +/- manipulations, regardless of what we did.
They could argue that they saved time until the life-saving vaccine is there. But the vaccines are a) not very efficient/life-saving and b) creating and spreading further the mutations with higher R values than the original strain.
The only argument left for their strategy is that those mutations are ever more harmless, therefore their strategy to delay, not eliminate, might in the end still be considered successful by some.
But they are not willing or able to realize just that and change horses, and the price, in form of economic, societal and soon medical damage, is simply unjustifiable and out of proportion anyway, though that is true for all other countries who lost their nerves and senses.
Time to round up the zero covid advocates – including that horrid friend of Chelsea Clinton’s advising Sturgeon – and charge them for the damage they have created.
“Delta’s highly transmissible nature”
This has gone unchallenged, by TY. Maybe I’ve missed it, but has “Delta” actually been established to be materially more transmissible than classic SARS-CoV-2?
Like so much of the science around SARS/Covid, it’s all a bit murky. I think it’s just assumed that Delta is more transmissible but less virulent, in line with the evolutionary principle of virus mutation. The more deadly original strain, and subsequent variants, go down in flames with their host and therefore they have the genetic longevity of a kamikaze pilot whilst the milder variants get to gaily skip from host to host because they don’t kill them. A sound principle and it seems reasonable, a priori, to apply it to Delta.
Nevertheless, the scary media headline (‘the highly transmissible Delta variant!!’) is always lacking its qualifier (‘but far less virulent’) so a welcome mutation to a far less deadly virus variant becomes a trigger for yet more panic in ruling circles and compliance by the plebs with their disastrous edicts.
It’s not “just assumed”. It’s an exact repetition of the claims already made for the Kent-variant, namely “some random set of PCR tests we examined were positive with a lower CT value”, hence, we assume higher viral load and thus, greater transmissibility.
These people always repeat themselves and the only sensible thing to do with any of ther anecdote collection is bin them. They’re all meaningless convenience studies create by teams of researchers digging through large sets of data in order to find some supporting their preconceived opinion.
As a totally unrelated example: A couple of years ago, a team of researchers of the university Mainz published a study claimed to demonstrate that smoking impairs the cognitive abilities of smokers. As the data absolutely woudn’t budge, they simply dropped all information regarding to women from their dataset before publishing it. Women are strange, anyway, everyone knows that, hence, this was surely justified!
As a German saying goes: Sociology is the misuse of a terminology invented for this purpose (Soziologie ist der Mißbrauch einer Terminologie, die zu diesem Zweck erfunden wurde).
What’s happened to New Zealand and even more,if that’s possible,to Austrailia is frankly unbelievable. Near complete crushing of the most basic freedoms, for a flu level infection that waned naturally last year (to reappear in mutated form from the jabbed now). Tirning what were attractive places to live into facsimiles of North Korea – minus the concentration camps, but that’s the next step.
It’s not about health, but control. A crazed sect grabbing power and oppressing the the people. Scenes of mass prtest in Australia are encouraging. Just say NO.