World-leading?
So, the Herald has found someone, as we can see from today’s issue, who is able to explain why we should not claim to have been “world-leading” in our response to the covid epidemic.
It seems that we have been kidding ourselves when we celebrated our low total number of deaths from the virus (at just 27 so far) when others – even on a percentage of total population basis – have registered lives lost to the virus at much higher numbers. And we were also mistaken to have congratulated ourselves on the immediate bounce-back our economy has enjoyed. Neither of these measures matters a damn, it seems, and we should concede that others – with much higher death rates and flat-lining economies – have nevertheless done so much better.
Such advice should be gratefully received, if only to reinforce what many of us know already – that critics of the government will reach for any stick with which to beat it, even if they have to defy the evidence and rationality to do so.
Bryan Gould
9 October 2021
1 Comment
It is extraordinary how many commenters on other blogs have used the vocabulary associated with toxic regimes – like ‘apartheid’, ‘the need for Nuremburg trials’ (to capture and condemn Jacinda Ardern and her ministers), ‘the need for revolution’, ‘execution of the woke’, ‘hang the traitors’, ‘get rid of the pretty communist’ (McCarthyism). Critics are certainly defying the evidence and rationality, and worse: projecting macabre thoughts on a government which has the needs of its people front and centre.