I’ll keep this short for two reasons. First, it’s late, I’ve been working all day, and I want to go to bed. Second, because short and sweet is often better than long and verbose: Make your point and sit down, a Judge friend of mine would often say to me over a glass of Pinot.
This is something that has been on my mind for a long time, well prior to this lockdown. The government has a bevvy of medical and scientific advisors, but where are the business advisors and economists stressing how financially destructive the lockdowns are? It can be rationalised, and Gareth Morgan has done it really well. It’s on his Facebook page, so if you cannot access that, here it is verbatim:
Determining our Tolerance of Covid.
The conventional approach to covid that’s emerging in Europe at least is that you get your population sufficiently vaccinated not so you have herd immunity but rather so that your health system can cope with the hospitalisations and in particular ICU needs. The better your health system the lower the vaccination rate you need, the earlier you can open up. On that measure it would be interesting to see when NZ throws away the masks and lockdowns like Denmark and the UK have and as NSW is intending.It’s akin to asking what rate of deaths from covid would we find acceptable, the rate being the number per week say?
Currently the UK leaders are happy with 1.5 per mill per week, Denmark 0.5, Aussie 0.2. What’s our tolerance? O.2 would be 1 person per week. Mimicking Denmark would allow 3, the UK 8? If you – or at least our beloved leaders – pick a number then we can work out the vaccination rate we have to get to and the number of ICU beds we’ll need to let it rip.
The more ICU beds, the lower the vaccination rate we need and vice versa.This is the hard cold reality of the pandemic.
Really it’s no different to traffic accidents, death by the flu, air travel. Make the call on how many isn’t too many and you get the policy settings needed. Of course many people will say no deaths from covid is acceptable. But that’s as naïve as saying we should close the roads so nobody has a road accident. What is missing right now is that the NZ leadership hasn’t communicated how many deaths it will tolerate from covid. Clearly it’s more than zero otherwise they wouldn’t have opened the bubble with Australia, or operated an MIQ that leaks. Once they settle on a target death rate then we’ll all know what our route to living with the virus will be.
Sir Ian Taylor wrote a good piece on the weekend imploring the government to listen to business. The Herald put it behind a paywall, but here’s some teasers:
The economy simply cannot afford to keep replaying the same level 4 restrictions that played out over the past couple of weeks, nor can businesses expect to operate successfully on the international playing fields with an MIQ system that simply has no rules they can play by.
We do understand the pressure the coaching team is under when dealing to a game that is changing constantly on the field in front of you, but, if you could just take your eye off that field for a moment, you will see that sitting below you, you have one of the strongest benches in the world.
Where is the business expertise? Is it being sought? Because it’s really, really needed
Why isn’t David Seymour’s “alternative strategy” being given some thought?
Will the prime minister, safe in her $475,000.00 per annum salary, listen to bar owners, whose livelihoods depend on being open?
An Auckland pub owner is pleading for more support from the Government, saying a lot of hospitality businesses aren’t going to survive the latest lockdown.
Steve Gillett, who owns popular sports bar and restaurant The Kingslander near Eden Park, has written a letter to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and his local MP, Melissa Lee, saying hospitality businesses simply can’t sustain prolonged periods of lockdown while level 2 conditions are too tough to operate in.
While extra resurgence support payments announced on Friday will help, it’s not enough, said Gillett, who has owned and operated The Kingslander for 16 years.
Can we ever expect a government full of unionists, teachers and social workers to understand the plight of the very people that pay the taxes in this country that allow these parasites to have a public “service” existence?
Probably no. But at least try, you dipshits.
No Minister 
Time for ACT to step up to the plate and challenge the assumptions that this whole catastrophe is premised on
For sure they will be crucified in the media but that goes with the territory, they need to show they represent the people and their values not just the effete urban elites
“but where are the business advisors and economists stressing how financially destructive the lockdowns are”?
Been absent since day one Nick, once upon a time there might have been the odd person with some commercial awareness in and around Governments but since the Political science Grads became the norm and it is not the Preserve of the current government, the ability to satisfy the Party trumps any such commerce awareness. There is zero understanding when digesting the single point of production advice, cabinet decisions are based on. Of course currently the advice has to satisfy the one Brain (Advisedly) in much of such decision making. Health professionals, Modelers, and public servants do not have any exposure to risk and reward in business, the money is delivered every Monday
Currently there is not one single MP in Government with any, even minor success in commercial reality.
Why are businesses just open up?
Stick it to the government.
What are they gonna do about it? Arrest everyone?
One has to wonder why National and or Act have not set up their own independent Board of Experts.
Such a Board would consist of say:
A Virologist
A Statistician
A Doctor
An Economist
A Businessman
Perhaps with some well known Virologist as an overseas expert, Head of Virology Harvard University
Such a Board could keep the debate honest
It would also move the debate
It would also move the solutions
It would keep the debate and the alternatives in front of the public on a weekly basis.
As the Spectator says quoting Dr Robert Malone an American Virologist and immunologist indicated the bug mutates fast, we are in danger of going down the same alley as the excessive use of antibiotics. All we will do with constant vaccine use is create a super bug….which will really kill us.
Seems logical in my mind but I’m just a businessman!.
I’ll leave the last word to HL Mencken
“No democratic delusion is more fatuous than that all men are capable of reason, and hence susceptible to conversion by evidence.”
We are beholden to a small group of “experts™” who have promoted the most extreme doom filled vision of how this epidemic will play out
More sober and realistic scenarios proposed by often more qualified individuals don’t get a look in
Facts that contradict the official narrative are “factchecked” by self appointed watchdogs who then label them as “misinformation™”
Debate is not allowed
And of course, in a matter that goes right to the heart of this post, all peripheral issues are totally ignored
The bullet points are
•The Disease is deadly
•The only solution is lockdowns and vaccines
•And the Government knows best
Concerning point 1 in NSW yesterday there were 7 “deaths” ascribed to the virus
One was a women in her sixties
Three were people in their eighties
Three were people in their nineties
The 8.2 million people in this Australian have had their lives disrupted and put on hold for eighteen months now because a small number elderly people die from complications arising from an allegedly new virus
The 90+ other people who breathed their last in NSW yesterday are just business as usual
Concerning point 2
Locking down the productive members of society for months at a time to try and prevent old people from dying is a quixotic fools errand. Cheaper and more sensible strategies to mitigate the effect of this virus on the easily identified vulnerable people in our society are pooh poohed as are treatment protocols that may limit its severity if it does take hold
And vaccinating people against a disease that presents no threat to them with an untested vaccine that does carry risk is entering Dr Mengele territory
Concerning point 3
I am genetically programed to distrust Governments and as the horrors of the 20th century reveal this is a entirely rational thing to do
Follow the money. I worked at Pfizer in Sydney before the North Ryde site was sold and bowled over for a housing development in 2018. It is widely established that the company has little interest in making hemorrhoid ointments and the like (Like they did at North Ryde). The holy grail for them is easily mass manufactured, small dose volume, special purpose products that they can sell for a premium. \
Looks like they found it.
Rossco mentions Dr Robert Malone. He is credited at the inventor of mRNA technologies as a young whizz kid back in the ’80’s.
Here’s a link to him and members of the Pandemic Health Alliance. Well worth watching.
https://citizensoftheamericanrepublic.org/2021/09/13/the-government-has-seized-control-of-the-medical-profession-steve-bannons-war-room-pandemic/