The Lessons of New Zealand’s Failed Zero Covid Strategy Must Be Learned
Stanford Professor of Medicine and Great Barrington Declaration co-author Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has written an evaluation of New Zealand’s Zero Covid strategy in Spiked. While initially successful in eliminating the virus from the island nation, says Dr. Bhattacharya, the success of the strategy was time-limited and came at great cost.
The Zero Covid success, however, was far from costless or complete. Closed borders meant many ex-pats faced steep hurdles returning home, even to care for sick family members. The two-month-long lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic led many to delay essential health services, subsequently causing overburdened hospital systems and long delays in medical care for tens of thousands of New Zealanders that continue to this day. Despite effectively zero community spread of Covid in 2021, the average of weekly mortality levels was higher than expected, given mortality patterns from before the pandemic.
There was economic damage as well during the Zero Covid period. New Zealand’s typically robust tourist industry collapsed as overseas visitors stopped coming. The New Zealand economy shrank by 2% in 2020 despite Zero Covid, recovered to grow by 5.6% in 2021, but shrank again in the first quarter of 2022 as Omicron cases spread throughout the nation. In July 2022, inflation reached 7.3%, sharply reducing the purchasing power of New Zealanders.
Looming over the citizens of New Zealand throughout its Zero Covid glory days was the threat of another lockdown whenever the public-health authorities found even a single case on the island. After 100 days with no community transmission, in August 2020, the emergence of a few cases led Ardern’s Government to impose a stay-at-home order in Auckland and restrictions on gatherings in the rest of the country. This pattern repeated itself over and over during the pandemic, often including sharp restrictions on freedom of movement across the country. During one lockdown in September 2021, two enterprising citizens smuggled contraband Kentucky Fried Chicken into Auckland from outside the city limits and were arrested for the crime.
Dr. Bhattacharya notes that despite the impetus for ending the Zero Covid policy as rapidly as possible, the New Zealand Government “dawdled in its vaccine rollout and when the Delta wave of the virus hit the world, only a small fraction of New Zealand’s population was vaccinated, so the lockdown restrictions continued”.
The aim was to reopen once enough of the population were vaccinated to hit ‘herd immunity’, but it turns out this was based on a false confidence in the vaccines.
Unfortunately, New Zealand bet wrongly on the vaccine-induced herd-immunity approach. The problem is that while the vaccine prevents severe disease and death due to Covid, it does not stop the disease from spreading. This fact was impossible to know with certainty in late 2020.
By late 2021, country after country with high vaccination levels experienced large waves of Covid cases. The only way this was possible was if the vaccine did not stop people from becoming infected and transmitting the disease onward. High-quality papers published in top medical journals demonstrated that vaccination protected against infection for only a few months after vaccination. Boosting with additional vaccine doses – especially in the Omicron era – also does not prevent infection.
From this evidence, it was clear that New Zealand’s herd-immunity strategy would inevitably fail. When it finally opened up, it could expect a significant wave of Covid cases, which is precisely what happened.
The Omicron wave hit the world in late 2021 and early 2022, with a highly infectious variant capable of evading immunity and infecting both people who were Covid recovered and vaccinated people in high numbers.
By February 2022, like other developed countries, New Zealand had successfully vaccinated a large proportion of its population, elderly and young, vulnerable and non-vulnerable alike. The pressure on the government to relax the lockdowns was immense. Finally, even as a wave of new cases hit New Zealand in late February/early March 2022, PM Ardern jettisoned Zero Covid and adopted a ‘suppression’ policy. In April, Ardern’s government rescinded New Zealand’s vaccine mandates and passport policies. The Covid surge that started in late February continues to today. Zero Covid lockdowns have not returned, though mask mandates remain in place in select venues.
Dr. Bhattacharya unequivocally concludes that, “ultimately, New Zealand’s Zero Covid strategy was immoral, incoherent and a grand failure”.
Worth reading in full.
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“The problem is that while the vaccine prevents severe disease and death due to Covid,…”
Do please show the evidence for this, and while doing so take out the definition of vaccinated as those who had the jab for two weeks that classify these injured and Covid positive group.
They don’t work. They harm. I’m afraid Jay is behind on this one. He’s been under a lot of pressure so it doesn’t surprise me he isn’t railing against these horrendous jabs,
It doesn’t surprise me that he’s parroting these falsehoods in Spiked. I stopped reading their articles when it became clear that their idea of a free society did not extend to the people who chose not to be injected with an experimental product. They pretended to, as free speech/thought is what they’ve built their brand on, but they did it through gritted teeth while quite aggressively criticising and mocking the unvaxxed. It was a real eye opener for me – I soon realised that the people who I believed thought like me, didn’t think like me at all. Only Brendan O’Neill kept his counsel as far as I’m aware.
But, there was a Spiked article supporting the vax mandate for health care workers. Wasn’t that written by him? Correct me if I’m wrong and it was someone else, but I stopped reading Spiked because of that article and cancelled my regular payment to them.
You may well be right Deborah, I think I’d stopped reading their stuff before it got to that stage. Wouldn’t surprise me at all though – those people are an absolute disgrace. The worst sort of hypocrites.
Edit: found it https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/07/14/yes-care-home-workers-must-be-vaccinated/amp/. Disgusting.
Apologies FL, I hadn’t read this when I posted my response.
Blimey.
Reported as spam.
Same here!
Did you see the option, “I’ve had a bad day and want to report someone”?! Hahaaha
Unfortunately FL, Brendan O’Neill wrote a piece in Spiked pushing for mandatory injections of Care Home workers. It was a nasty and vindictive piece which paid no heed to the mountains of evidence already confirming the dangers of the snake oil. Published mid 2021 I think.
And that’s when I cancelled my subscription to Spiked.
All of the GBD three seem to rate the vaccines as effective – this surprises me if only because the things have no safety profile; for this reason alone, their advocacy for the things seems reckless. Even Carl Heneghan has not expressed any reservations about them, as far as I am aware (but then I heard him once refer to someone needing statins, and this also surprised me)
NZ might be a cautionary tale in what happens when good intentions are weaponised; meanwhile here in the UK the Justice Sec is working to limit the liability of politicians for their actions during the pandemic, and also to restrict the power of the judiciary. I’ll bet he also keeps a bag packed for when the **** properly hits the fan.
“The problem is that while the vaccine prevents severe disease and death due to Covid, it does not stop the disease from spreading. This fact was impossible to know with certainty in late 2020.”
Real world evidence (as opposed to manipulated studies) that show that the “vaccines” do any noticeable good is rather hard to find – in fact from what I have read it’s easier to conclude they do the opposite.
More or less anything is “impossible to know with certainty” but most people on LS/DS expected the “vaccines” not to work – another conspiracy theory.
Indeed. I was one of the few here who was willing to give the vaccines a chance. They never made sense for anyone healthy under 75 in my view, given risk of ADE. But I had assumed the trials were conducted with integrity.
I am horrified at the extent of the duplicity revealed, and the complicity (or even downright encouragement) from regulators (no doubt directed by politicians). I cannot trust clinical data ever again. And I am loathe to take any medicine. Lucky for me I am super healthy and don’t need it. I’m going to stay away from doctors and pray it stays that way.
Me too. I was open to considering the covid vaxx for a while, but the more I looked into it the less it stacked up.
The jabs weren’t designed to stop transmission, just to reduce symptoms. We knew this already. I’m very disappointed by many statements that Jay makes in this article.
“…The problem is that while the vaccine prevents severe disease and death due to Covid, it does not stop the disease from spreading.”
No, the problem is that statement is a load of garbage!
How tiresome is it, reading that tripe.
Many analyses on DS (including recently) have suggested strongly that the injections do not prevent severe disease and death.
Indeed they don’t. The severe disease and death refrain was invented when it became clear that the vaccines did nothing at all to prevent infection. This baseless claim is being maintained by endless repetition by people like Jay Bhattacharya who ought to know better, but clearly don’t.
It was very kind of the Kiwis to contribute to this grand experiment in disease control.
The mistake is to ignore the findings of the experiment — that for coronavirus the approach resulted in net harm.
You’d think it would be important for humanity to fully understand the impact of covid and our NPIs — however, governments worldwide think it is much much more important to ensure that everything that they did was broadly great, and that all we need are a few tweaks — eg,
The vast majority of governments are as guilty as hell, with a few exceptions. So much so that they will be struggling to wheedle their way out of it. Part of their methodology to protect themselves is to ignore it as much as possible, while other problems emerge that they can blame someone else for, and so on. So, keep calm and carry on criticising what has been done.
Methinks that’s more-or-less directly the viewpoint of the people responsible for The Science[tm]: None of our idea worked and all of them had seriously bad unintended consequences. However, all of them almost worked, hence, our ideas a broadly brilliant but we need to tweak the implementation somewhat more. I can’t really speak for anything but the field I’m somewhat familiar with (for professional reasons) but that’s the exact mindset behind a seriously large body of academic computer science research. Nobody’s ever wrong about anything and the end of the rainbow where the pot of gold is to be found is just another round of tweaks to the same stupid idea away. There are software research projects which have been running in this way (decentralized) since the 1950s whose products have kept failing in the real world ever since and everybody knows that. But here comes the next round implementation tweaks and making stuff more complicated and THEN, it’ll certainly finally work. So-disposed people are a holy terror for everyone who’s actually required to get real stuff done and hence, they’re best kept in isolated aquariums where they can’t do much damage to anything. It’s certainly not coincidence that a sizable… Read more »
Aquariums seem like an excellent place to put such idiots. They have about the same amount of intelligence as the usual inhabitants.
i would like to socially isolate them, into permanent solitary confinement
You would think that given NZ had 18 months to look at the experiments going on overseas that we would learn from those. But no, we clearly did not. All the same mistakes have been and are being made here. The health care mandate remains, despite dire staff shortages, and masking and jabbing propaganda continues. It was laughable to see NZ officials and competitors at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham wearing face coverings despite there being no requirement. I guess they were under instruction to follow the “rules” as they applied at home, just to show some sort of misguided loyalty to the NZ government. Bizarre.
I know that Dr. Bhattacharya is getting a lot of heat in the comments for his statements around vaccine effectiveness, but let’s slay one dragon at a time. The paper is about the futility of the lockdowns and on that point I think we all agree.
We do all indeed agree but the lockdowns and the “vaccine” are strongly connected. Lockdowns only really made any sense at all (within the loony world of the covidians) if one thought an effective vaccine could be developed in a reasonable timeframe, otherwise the lockdowns would have needed to last decades.
He says that we could not have known for certain that the vaccines would not work in 2020, and this is true in the strict sense of “for certain”, but he seems to be excusing lockdowns at that point, as if betting everything on vaccines was ever a defensible or proportionate approach.
The purpose behind lockdowns and all other NPI’s was fear and control. Once the population had been scared witless and had become familiar with being told what to do and when they were more likely to accept the snake oil.
The injections are intended to maim and kill and it is now abundantly clear that that is exactly what they are doing.
We also now have an impending financial crisis – entirely manufactured – and God knows how this Winter will play out. When the population is cold and hungry what further freedoms will be surrendered for a few slices of bread? CBDC? Of course.
And at that point the gates are very firmly shut.
To update the brilliant Neil Oliver:
It’s NEVER about what they say it’s about.
If only TPTB had looked at the Diamond Princess cruise ship and what effects Covid had on their passengers things should have been so different. However, as this was a planned pandemic with the intention of jabbing everything with a pulse, stopping them was not going to be easy. Whilst there is money to be earned we are just pieces on a chess board.
There is no way they didn’t have the Diamond Princess data. The million dollar question is, why they chose to ignore it and go with predictions from models instead.
Because there is no money to be made in staying calm and carrying on as normal
I’d prefer if the lessons from 2020 – 2022 would be learnt. Sars-CoV2 spread worldwide in autumn 2019. It took until 2020 for the gene engineering guys to notice that. They then dutifully applied all their usual toys in order to inform us about the fact that A Novel Kind of Cold was spreading, something we wouldn’t ever have learnt if they hadn’t done this. They also devised a gene-engineering based test in order to detect Novel Kind of Cold even in its absence and set forth to gene-engineer a Novel Kind of Vaccine to protect us from the Novel Kind of Cold they had happily found. In the meantime, a Novel Kind of Artifically Generated Mass Panic was supposed to cloud the fact that nobody needed a Novel Kind of Vaccine For The Novel Kind of Cold.
That was a case of the perennial solution in frantic search of a problem going seriously awry and shouldn’t ever happen again. Gene engineering is useless and must be globally defunded.
I’ll give you my red pilled version of that. A coronavirus had been engineered between the labs of fort Dietrich USA and some other black sites including at least one Beta version allocated to Wuhan and in the charge of one infamous Peter Dazec (sic). USA 2019; the upcoming US election was not looking good for the plans of globalinc, Trump was gathering a strong base no matter how hard the controlled media tried to take him out. They needed to make sure he wasn’t re-elected and keeping people cowering in their houses forcing the populous to vote by mail fit the bill with their newly installed vote machines and their ground team of Antifa fanatics ready to stuff ballot boxes. It was decided that the pandemic that had been game planned at Event 201 and prior runs would be pushed forward. The Beta virus was not known as to how strong and long this chimeric amalgam of various existing virus strains including HIV would retain its mortality levels before becoming background level but there was no more time to guess and in late 2019 it was seeded in Wuhan, Tehran and Northern Italy. The rest was already gamed and… Read more »
These are not mistakes in policy. You’re probably right about the political US response to the pandemic being partially a Democrats-operated voter suppression scheme to stop Trump from being re-elected. That happened on the point when the train was already well in motion and all kinds of political chancers jumped onto the wagons in order to also get some traction for their pet causes. Apart from that, I expect that the generic story you’re telling will resurface next winter, properly updated to account for every unpredictable event unrelated to it which happened to have happened until then. Everything people undertake is fraught with mistakes. A nice COVID story showing that would be the one of the Italian moron trying to contain COVID by aping what the Chinese claimed to have done to contain it. This caused Sars-CoV2 epicentres to spread rapidly accross all of the Italian peninsula until he had locked down all of Italy and pretty much the only thing completely unaffected by that was the virus itself. Obviously, he still doesn’t think that happened because either his assessment of the initial situation or his reaction to it could possibly have been wrong. This kind of pathetic failure is… Read more »
I share your views.
I’ve noticed similar depths of rabbit hole from your posts.
Its good to have company down here.
😉
The “toothy tyrant” is looking a bit rough in that photo. Presumably she just had her 4th booster
“Presumably she just had her 4th booster.”
Oh, I do hope so. Actually I’d be amazed if she’s had one.
On the picture taken of her receiving the gloop, there was a big Cork on the needle. Klaus wouldn’t let his poster girl receive the “vaccine”.
Just for a bit of context. NZ reached a rate of infections 37% higher than the UK’s all time peak during a period when they had 84% vaccinated.
The “strategy” (if you want to call it that) failed on its own terms, but these terms were IMO immoral and unreasonable and not in keeping with how humans being want to live, freely, as social animals, and the compromises we have been prepared to make, since time immemorial, to enable us to continue doing that. The human cost of lockdowns was always going to be vastly greater than any benefit in containing a not especially dangerous virus in comparative historical terms. So even had the “strategy” “succeeded” i would be strongly opposed to it on principle.
So….
‘The problem is that while the vaccine prevents severe disease and death due to Covid, it does not stop the disease from spreading.’
...I don’t agree with this statement at all and wonder why Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said it. As far as I know, and I don’t know much, the vaccines have led to extremely severe disease AND death in many cases throughout the world. This is documented all over the place unless I have teleported to a parallel universe where vaccines work, no one died and chocolate ice cream comes out of the cold water tap. I admire Dr Bhattacharya no less but I do have a problem with that.
He’s always been saying that. So weird, as the data don’t support it once given even the tiniest bit of scrutiny.
“You’re looking tired, Jac, you need to get some rest.” Cue Bourne Supremacy music…
Zero Covid was always going to be a disaster despite all these Gung Ho statements by the NZ govt. They basically shot themselves in the foot. It is an impossible target to reach. The Chinese govt of course, which never seems to learn, doesn’t think so. They think they can eradicate anything by clamping down on it or killing it or both. During the cultural revolution, Mao in his great wisdom realised that sparrows ate far too much grain and should therefore be killed. So, people in their millions were tasked with driving the birds into the open and killing them. The next year, they suffered a horrendous plague of insects which ate all the grain and China had a major famine on its hands. They have also tried to eradicate extremism by locking up all the Uighurs. The Chinese are sort of collectively insane – apologies to sane Chinese, I have nothing against you, just the insanity of the Chinese system.
Lots of interesting comments here that I agree with. We’re in a state of limbo where many people around the world are trying to behave as if we are back to “normal”, ignoring the reality of what’s happened on over the last 2 years plus. Spiked no longer appear to support “Ban Nothing, Question Everything”. Other alternative outlets have suffered too. (Even this site published a pathetic takedown of Sam Bailey without asking any real questions.) Perhaps all people whose careers depend on the teetering house of cards that is the Western public (un)health system are reluctant to recognise that radical change is necessary. Dr Fauci and his cronies are responsible for a lot but the rot set in much earlier. Most westerners are reluctant to question mainstream science, very susceptible to suggestions of new threats and the promise of magical treatments. Maybe we are doomed to return to living (and dying) hand-to-mouth in order to face up to the unsustainability of our current system.
Is the sainted Jacinta looking haggard and drawn because she’s realised that she’s screwed the NZ economy? Or because the cold virus didn’t behave as she told it to?