The New Zealand First Party wants to investigate whether people who lost their jobs over the Covid-19 vaccine mandate could receive compensation from the Crown.
The idea of payments for people who lost their jobs rather than get vaccinated has been mentioned by NZ First speakers many times but does not crop up in the party's manifesto.
Instead, the manifesto pledges to "end all vaccine mandates....and hold a credible, fully independent inquiry into New Zealand’s Covid-19 response."
NZ First's deputy leader, Shane Jones, says the possibility of compensation would be covered by this investigation.
"In our manifesto, we are having a comprehensive review of the whole Covid experience," Jones says.
"Included in that review is consideration of whether there should be recompense for those people who were arbitrarily mandated out of their livelihoods."
Polls show NZ First's support may be required by the National Party to form a government after Saturday's election. Both the Labour Party and NZ First have ruled out working with each other.
The final Covid-19 restrictions ended in August, and then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced a Royal Commission of Inquiry into NZ's response to the Covid-19 pandemic last December.
Jones says he does not know how much compensating these people would cost, and the review itself could establish this. He adds the inquiry would involve international experts, who would "not be captured by the New Zealand bureaucracy or by those parliamentarians who did not not stand up against the excesses of the Covid response."
During the Covid crisis, vaccination was mandatory for many people working in sectors such as health and education, police and defence.
A recent article in the New Zealand Medical Journal, based on research by doctors and scientists, says NZ's Covid-19 pandemic response has been among the world’s most effective, based on key public health metrics such as low cumulative excess mortality.
25 Comments
The last sentence is a good example of lazy journalism. We cannot expect an objective evaluation of the New Zealand COVID response from people who had major roles in defining that response. The author should at least include names of the authors of the report in the article to allow readers to make it own decision about the article objectivity.
I believe that most readers do not have time to look into linked article but rely on a journalist to investigate and raise a potential problem. Otherwise, we don't need journalists and it would be enough to propagate links. I believe that interest.co.nz is among the best news sources in NZ and writing this with hope to further improve it.
At a glance, the leading author is Michael Baker who was one of the architects of NZ's covid response. There's no corresponding author because it's it's a "viewpoint" whatever that means. Probably means it's not peer-reviewed? On page 78 of the pdf version there's a graph of NZ doing fantastically in terms of excess deaths. There's a little sticker next to the graph showing "Our world in Data" however if you go to that data source you see that NZ currently has very high excess deaths. Confusingly, one of the quoted data sources for the graph is the Human Mortality Database but that datasource only has data for NZ up to 2021, but the graph goes to 2023. I guess I should just leave it to the experts.
As you probably know, Labour has restricted the Covid inquiry terms of reference to protect the bureaucrats decision making & exclude the wider economic impact on NZdrs.
Hence the criticism from left & right
https://www.nzinitiative.org.nz/reports-and-media/opinion/country-may-n…
https://www.greens.org.nz/covid_inquiry_disappointingly_narrow
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/covid-response-royal-commission-…
Someone else commented on a different article that Winston really has timed this to perfection. He is riding the momentum for the last week, and will now - as you say - probably be able to hoover up another couple of percent that might have gone to the real fringe anti-mandate parties.
One wonders how many of the doctor and scientist researchers in the aforementioned NZMJ article were part of the 11,000 secretly exempted from vaccine mandates (as discovered through FOI requests)
I wonder when MSM will report this?
Or this?
https://hatchardreport.com/startling-revelations-change-everything-new-…
The whole lab leak/weaponised virus has been quietly dismissed by the media. Anybody who spoke about this at the start was dismissed as a conspiracy theorist.
why stop there,lots of disaffected folks out there,.anti-fluoridation,cell towers,blood transfutions.no figures for percentage of population suffering from PPD (paranoid personality disorder) but could be considerable,problem getting them out to vote as they turn back when think they are being followed.
AS per Dans reference
"" Current COVID-19 vaccines have limited and short duration of immunity to asymptomatic infection and mild disease and therefore have little effect on reduction of community spread.""
but I thought we had to all get vaccinated to save Granny?
Turns out ..not.
But you lost your job because you figured this out on your own.? .Tough luck it would seem.
As much as academics like to hand wave and say "look at the overall death stats,our whole response was so effective", you need to dimension it into its components.
How many lives did vaccine passes actually save particularly once it was established that the vaccine didnt stop transmission?
How many lives did employment mandates themselves save?
Were either of those measures worth the human rights cost?
Or were lockdowns and masks the blunt instrument that purportedly saved all the lives? Plus our isolation and dumb luck?
I'd have thought lockdowns and the closed borders until Delta was dominant and vaccines were in arms were the big hitters.
The various coersions must have increased vaccine uptake but I suspect it would have been quite high anyway, well into the 70-80%? Much higher for the elderly and those at most risk
In my technical medical speciality, the vast majority of my colleagues got the vaccine as soon as it was available. As far as I'm aware, a couple of percent of us (nationwide) were coerced into vaccination by the threat of being fired. Another percent or two quit/were fired rather than being vaccinated.
Lets have a close look at what the anti-vaxers were worried about:
Actual deaths from the vaccine = 4 at the most, and in those 4 cases none can definitely be attributed to the vaccine.
Last annual road toll = 378
So, a simple inference will be that anti-vaxers must always be indoors at home and too afraid to venture out the front gate because they have a nearly 100 times greater chance to be killed on the pavement or road than from a bad reaction to the Covid vaxination.
Not a lot of people know that, including that pompous ass Shane Jones.
So, a simple inference will be that anti-vaxers must always be indoors at home and too afraid to venture out the front gate because they have a nearly 100 times greater chance to be killed on the pavement or road than from a bad reaction to the Covid vaxination.
It may have been, if your initial assumption about what anti-vaxers were worried about was remotely accurate.
While I cannot speak from personal experience, the anti-vaxers I know often took active steps to catch it when the opportunity arose to get natural immunity (radical and without precedent as I'm sure that sounds).
They also tried to obtain a supply of ivermectin in case the virus was as bad as the govt claimed..
but that too was confiscated at the border..
Just got home from watching the "river of freedom".Good movie (a bit long).
I'd forgotten all the bullshit foisted upon us in 2020/2021.
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