The international media seem to like New Zealand’s pandemic story, at least, they do in Britain, whether that be the BBC or the Guardian. It’s just a shame that they have to ask Michael Baker about it, an academic who spends most of his time talking to gullible journalists. The hypocrisy of the man is staggering, but the media is too lazy to care, since he is always available for a soundbite. He is nothing if not inconsistent: even if he always sounds moderate he has always advocated the most authoritarian policies.

So today New Zealand finally opened up the country to foreign travellers, as long as they had taken the vaccines that people like Baker have been pushing. With Omicron already rampant, the authorities have decided to let everybody in again. But hold on, the pandemic is the worst it has ever been here, out of control, they have no idea how many Covid cases there are because the policy framework collapsed in early March. Yes, New Zealand held Covid off for nearly two years: in February there had only been just over 15 000 cases, and only about 60 people had died. Yet, in just two months the death toll is now over 700, more than a ten fold increase; and there are thousands of new cases every day. The media tell us the pandemic is over, and they don’t need to report the casualties, but it has only just begun actually.

Now it was Baker that was one of the architects of the ‘elimination’ strategy, to achieve zero Covid and hold the ground. This required complete border closure and total lockdowns to maintain elimination. It also resulted in authoritarian policies, and the complete removal of civil liberties, but these hardships applied to the whole population. Then the new Covid variants emerged, including the dreaded Delta strain. Academics like Baker stated that there had to be a total lockdown at the first sign of it escaping border control. So the dear leader, Jacinda Ardern, did what the experts told her, and imposed a nation-wide lockdown in August 2021, even though the Delta cases remained in the Auckland area. In those days anything over 100 new Delta cases was considered intolerable, and so, while the complete lockdown was lifted outside Auckland, it had to remain in place until Covid cases were stamped out.

Then the new vaccine became available, Comirnaty, made by the Pfizer corporation. Ardern decided that there did not have to be any more lockdowns if most of the adult population was vaccinated twice. The experts told her that any future outbreak would be confined to the unvaccinated, who would clog up the health system, and possibly infect some of the good people who did what they were told. So she devised a system of punishments for the people who refused to be vaccinated with the Pfizer drug, or were waiting for an alternative. Professor Baker and his friends then took to the airwaves stating that the unvaccinated were bad people who should be shut out of society and forcibly removed from public space, and anywhere that their presence made the good people feel unsafe. So a surveillance system had to be introduced so every shop, public library and church could check in the good people and keep the bad ones out. One day in February all the bad people decided to congregate together in the most public place in the country, which was the Parliament, where the elected representatives hid from their sight.

In the meantime it emerged that the Pfizer drug, Comirnaty, actually caused serious health disease, and this led to people dying after being injected. There were a number of such serious diseases, but it was a heart condition, Myocarditis, that caused fatalities. The health department officials were asked to investigate, and could find no causation in most cases, unless it happened to a young person. And the experts like Professor Baker told the media that people were more likely to get Myocarditis from contracting Covid, despite not offering any real evidence. Unfortunately for Baker and friends, along came another Covid variant, Omicron, which was apparently more contagious, but less life threatening. So it now seemed that all people who had the Pfizer injection, and thought they had immunity from Covid, did not have immunity at all. Thousands of people around the world would get Omicron, but they would not die, only the unvaccinated people would perish. The experts told the media that, while the vaccines could not prevent contraction of the virus, it would magically kick into gear to prevent the vaccinated dying.

Unfortunately, here we are in New Zealand with thousands and thousands of people catching Omicron, hundreds of them having to be admitted to hospital, and a daily death toll in double figures. And the Ministry of Health revise up the death toll figures every week to include all the people who died that were discovered to have contracted Covid, even if it was not the cause of death. Although the media do not investigate this practice, it does seem as if almost every patient who is admitted to intensive care never comes out alive. Certainly vaccinated people are dying, despite being double vaccinated and ‘boosted’, and after the experts assured them they were ‘protected’. Professor Baker can spin the statistics however much he likes, and fool the gullible media supplicants that hang on his every word. But his policies have been a catastrophic failure, and the Pfizer vaccine isn’t actually safe as well as being totally ineffective now.