Summary
New Zealand’s royal commission into its Covid-19 response found vaccine mandates were reasonable based on available data but acknowledged they harmed social cohesion.
The report praised the country’s elimination strategy for achieving one of the lowest Covid death rates among developed nations while preventing healthcare system collapse.
However, it criticized prolonged lockdowns, weak health system preparedness, and a lack of planning for future crises.
Commissioners urged broad investment in pandemic readiness and emphasized the importance of both frontline and planning staff.
A second phase of the inquiry will review vaccine harms and conclude in 2026.
I’ll never forget watching NZ come out of lockdown and seeing people hug each other while I was still sanitizing groceries.
They were having rugby games while the rest of the world burned down in flames
Are you saying that New Zealand returned to normal before the rest of the world? Because that’s not how I remember it at all.
We had a four week (incredibly strict) lockdown in 2020 and then life returned to normal because we eliminated the virus. In late 2021 the delta variant ruined all that and the government attempted a half-assed lockdown which didn’t do much and that’s where a lot of the anger came from.
NZ had relatively a very short lock down and were one of the few oecd countries that was back to regular life in 2020. Other than wearing masks in certain places you could go to restaurants, movies, regular shops etc.
Eventually there was another lock down, for most of the country it was much shorter. One town had to go longer though cause they kept having cases pop up.
IIRC New Zealand returned to actual normal, as in COVID was a relative non-issue, faster than many other countries. Their restrictions were more severe and weren’t lifted very quickly, but when they were lifted things were actually fine.
Places like the US and much of Canada dropped restrictions while things were still pretty bad in terms of infection rates and strain on health care systems, and really they hardly enforced them to begin with. You could see this as a return to normalcy since restrictions were gone, but in Alberta they lifted restrictions when we were still dealing with plenty of deaths, severely impacted health care, and on top of that we were still figuring out the implications of the whole long COVID thing. That’s not a return to normal, I don’t think, it’s pretending things are normal when they’re not.
Reasonable is great when it comes to this kind of thing.
I feel that this is when social media really showed how much harm it could do to spread misinformation. Good on NZ.
By contrast USA had over 600,000 preventable deaths due to their utter lack of response… So is this what you would have preferred???
if only. more like we have to milk grandma and grandpa of all their life savings by keeping their miserable asses alive in assisted living for the economy.
[Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick suggests he, other seniors willing to die to get economy going again.
“Those of us who are 70 plus, we’ll take care of ourselves. But don’t sacrifice the country,” Patrick told Tucker Carlson.]
"And I encourage it to be released soon … the next pandemic may not be far away. We need to get on and prepare.”
Yeah, it’ll probably come from the US due to some vaccines becoming illegal in some States. Let’s just hope it doesnt spread through mouth rain like covid does.
Basically small droplets of water that are emitted from your mouth as you speak. They can’t be seen with the naked eye, and they float on the air. Its how covid is spread so fast in indoor settings.
I first heard it referred to as “mouth rain” on a Radio Lab podcast episode early in the pandemic
