Kids As Collateral

What cost is a price worth paying for "Zero Covid" politics?

Tune into the local news channel every night at six o’clock and one may well find themselves leaving with the impression that in New Zealand, despite the best efforts of those horribly backward “far-right anti-vaxxers” who seem to care a little too much about wanting to live freely, everything is just fine.

Better still, tune into the legacy media’s breakfast tv morning shows — notorious as their anchors are for their crazily crony relationships with the Prime Minister — and one may even switch off to finish their avocado on toast and almond milk latte feeling relieved that everything the current Labour government have implemented to tackle these past two-years of Covid has all been done with their best intentions at heart.

But is that true? And if not, at what cost will the country have to pay?

Steadfast supporters of Labour (many of whom could never, and will never, turn their backs on ‘Saint Jacinda’) do, quite rightly, point to one of the most crucial aspects of this now-deflating balloon that is the pandemic: body count.

Indeed, comparative to its nearest neighbours in Australia, a country that has to date suffered 4,422 deaths (just 0.017% of the population by the way), New Zealand does appear to come up smelling of roses with a mere 53 deaths, which accounts for 0.00106% of the near-five-million strong populace, placing it amongst one of the world’s lowest death rates for countries of similar density. Pandemic? What pandemic?

Unsurprisingly, her cheerleaders (who are heavily involved on all media platforms) will continue to suggest, too, that the numbers are in fact so low simply because New Zealand, better and more efficiently than any other country on planet earth, implemented one of the fastest and strictest ‘lockdowns’ from the very beginning, not just nationally, but internationally (numerous European states actually locked down days earlier which severely annoys a great many here who tend to hold up the lockdown strategy as being the prime reason for a particular type of ‘success’). Yes, that’s right, to much of the pro-vax crowd here, lockdowns do, indeed, work.

Secondary to that, to these same very noisy do-gooders, every measure and restriction applied since i.e. mask and vaccine mandates, ‘vaccine passports’, quarantine ‘hotels’, alert level “frameworks” and social distancing, have apparently been introduced and enforced all at exactly the right times — without fault — despite being carbon copies of the whimsical measures and restrictions from other nations abroad where “the science” continues to suggest they may well have never been necessary, or, at the very least, were wholly destructive to wider society and massively disproportionate to the dangers of the virus itself, which to the vast majority of people, Omicron or otherwise, has remained an almost negligible threat.

But just as others around the world continue to awaken themselves to the harsh reality of the past 24-months of politically-induced hardship, so too are Prime Minister Ardern’s ever-growing detractors.

And such a reality really isn’t for the weak of heart. *Insert vaccine joke here*

In a recent report released by the St John Ambulance detailing emergency service incidents from 2021, though there were dramatic declines in some incidences, “there was a concerning rise in the number of mental health and suicide attempt incidents – which were up 30 percent on the previous year.” A spokesperson added,

“We continue to respond to very distressed and vulnerable patients but the most disturbing trend out of these types of incidents, is the number involving patients aged under 14.

“This age group had a 36 percent increase in 2021 (up 49 patients to 186 patients) compared to the previous year (137 patients) and was 77 percent higher compared to 2019 (105 patients)."

The numbers are startling, but sadly, they follow global trends of mental health increases across the board (for all ages) over the course of the pandemic.

Across the 38-nation strong Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which has tracked many impacts of international Covid policy since the start of the outbreak, one report stated that, “prevalence of anxiety in early 2020 was double or more than double the level observed in previous years”, including in New Zealand.

Moreover, young people especially have borne the brunt of many ‘elimination strategy’ policies such as lockdown, with the statistics surrounding 15-24-year-olds very much raising the alarm.

According to a study conducted in August 2020 by loneliness.org.nz, a website dedicated to people’s all-round wellbeing,

“…prolonged loneliness among young people rose from 5.8% before the [Covid] crisis to 20.8% during the lockdown, and decreased only slightly to 17.7% in July 2020 after the lockdown ended.”

Additionally, despite much older generations being most often deemed as the ‘loneliest in society’, stuck as many are living miles away from family members within the confines of care homes and other health facilities, such findings were the

“highest among all age groups and four times higher than the share experiencing post-lockdown loneliness among those aged 65 and above.”

In essence, the mental health of teenagers and adolescents nationwide had begun to crumble at a lightning fast pace.

Whilst it’s important to remember that New Zealand isn’t alone on the world stage in the context of detrimental Covid-policy outcomes, it is important to remember, and realise, that pre-2020 New Zealand was already earmarked as a global leader in terms of mental health disparities, including youth suicide.

Data from the New Zealand Police, for instance, suggests that from 2015-2018, ‘mental health’ events reported to the police not only rose by 22% but that ‘attempted suicide’ events in the same time period rose by 43%.

That’s not all.

In 2017, a UNICEF study found, as highlighted here more thoroughly, that between the ages of 15-19, New Zealand accounted for the highest rate of 15.6 suicides per 100,000 people, twice that of the United States and almost five times as high as Great Britain. Maori communities, specifically, account for a much higher rate of suicide compared to other ethnic groups, and although male suicides make up a higher percentage than those of girls, interestingly the report also found that over time the rate in males had begun decreasing whilst that of suicide rates in girls was found to be increasing.

Add to that the country’s ongoing battles with bullying in schools, missed education, mask-mandated classrooms, child poverty (particularly in single-parent households), drug addiction, and domestic violence or Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) whereby, once more, the nation leads number one in the developed world, and all of a sudden the collateral damage — from just one angle alone — doesn’t appear to afford the consistency of the inane and insane grinning and gurning rituals that Kiwis everywhere have unfortunately come to expect from the often-absurd Cheshire Cat that is a Jacinda Ardern press conference performance. Second to Justin Trudeau, perhaps, she is likely the least ‘in-touch’ politician currently propped up on the world stage.

One then has to wonder, that in hindsight of all this information — information which would certainly have been known to the government — was appropriate extensive methodology truly undertaken by those at the top — “experts” so we were told — to compensate for the inevitable catastrophes that came with seemingly un-scientific “Zero Covid” policies?

If domestic violence, including child abuse, was known to be so tragically high, why were policies put in place that would unavoidably increase the likelihood of further hurt, suffering, and death within the home via lockdowns and other stringent restrictions? They did, by the way. A lot.

How and why, even, did this government — and most other governments — settle at a place that would ultimately view ‘Covid-only’ deaths (or harm) as more valuable to protect than any other medical menace, so much so, that almost every other treatment for almost every other disease — severe disease — no longer mattered? How could it ever be left to a reactionary establishment regime to determine which illnesses mattered more?

But finally, ask yourselves this: For how many generations will the policies of the past two-years, physically and psychologically, economically and socially, touch the people of this gravely-damaged nation?

Okay. We may not have ever asked for Covid to spring into existence from a Fauci-funded Chinese laboratory, but the actions of our ‘leaders’ in times of crises must surely always speak louder than their words.

Regrettably, however, it seems that as the dust begins to settle and a New Zealand parliament attempts to quash the fundamental right to protest on its very front lawns, both the actions and words of this Prime Minister were clearly never there to protect, but to pummel.