Click here to view original web page at brownstone.org
In the first year of the pandemic, a team from Otago University in New Zealand (my former university) published an interesting study that provided some explanation for the strong public support for lockdown measures. This support came despite known or predicted collateral harms, including loss of livelihoods, elevated mortality from neglect of other diseases and ailments, “deaths of despair” from greater loneliness, and police abuses.
The answer, they said, is the moralization of restrictions in pursuit of a Covid eradication strategy. People did not take kindly even to mere questioning of the restrictions. With many governments, for example the British, deploying state propaganda to the full to instill fear of the disease and shame all effort to question restrictions, the moralization deepened into sacralization.
This offers a plausible explanation for why people who so warmly embrace the moral framework of diversity, inclusion, and tolerance in social policy settings, ended up supporting vaccine apartheid for those hesitant to get jabbed by shots with worryingly thin efficacy and safety trials before approval for public use.
Jacinda Ardern’s government further reinforced New Zealand’s collective moral fervor by proclaiming its doctrine of the health ministry as the “ single source of truth ” on anything to do with coronavirus, including public health interventions.
With the passage of time, as evidence mounted of the folly of Zero Covid policy and the accumulating harms it was causing, the New Zealand government was trapped in a prison of its own construction and found it difficult to change course, even after the futility of the entire program became obvious in the data.
Initially, New Zealand attained extraordinarily successful results in keeping Covid under control and was widely lauded – by Anthony Fauci , ABC in Australia, the Guardian , NPR , the New York Times – as a model for hardline policy […]
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I hate being “that guy” who asks people to donate because I think our conservative news network is so crucial, but here I am…
When I left my cushy corporate job in 2017, I did so knowing that my family would have to make sacrifices. But I couldn’t continue to watch the nation slip into oblivion and was inspired by President Trump’s willingness to fight the good fight even at his own personal expense. What I didn’t realize then is that conservative media would be so heavily attacked, canceled, and defunded that the sacrifices would be extreme.
Many in this nation are struggling right now even though we weren’t struggling just a few years ago. I’m not alone. But I wake up every morning and operate the sites we’ve been able to build because there’s really no other choice. I refuse to be beholden to Big Tech like so many other conservative news outlets, which is why you won’t see Google ads here. With that said, it’s often challenging to pay the bills and it’s even harder to expand so we can get the America First message out to a wider audience.
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