[00:00:04] Hi, my name is Brendan Malone and you're listening to the dispatchers, the podcast that strives to cut through all the noise in order to challenge the popular narratives of the day with some good old fashioned contrarian thinking. You might not always agree, but at least you'll be taking a deeper look at the world around you.
[00:00:22] Hi everybody. Welcome along to the Friday Freebie edition of the Dispatchers podcast. It is great to be back with you again. My name is Brendan Malone. If you're new here, or if you haven't done it already, why not subscribe to the podcast? Give it a like, give it a rating. If the platform that you're listening on allows you to do that. If you're able to put a few stars up or share some words about what you think about the podcast, please do that. That all helps the podcast. Also, don't forget, if you are not a patron of left foot media, you can get a daily episode of the Dispatchers podcast every single day, Monday to Friday, by going to patreon.com left footmedia and becoming a $5 monthly patron. The link is in today's show notes and why I would encourage you to do that is not simply because you'll be hearing my dulcet tones and my various opinions, whether they are welcome or unwelcome about the world. 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With that out of the way, let's jump into today's topic of conversation, this brand new research from New Zealand showing that vaccine mandates caused significant and lasting harms, harms that were meaningful and some of which are still with us today, and they had limited effect on increasing vaccination uptake. And first of all, before we even explore this story, because what I want to do is read through the article and share my thoughts as we go in response. But before we even do that, I just want to say that I think it's really important to note that these stories are actually finally being published in mainstream media outlets. There is finally a public conversation happening about the morality and the efficacy of these policies. And this was a conversation that actually should have happened at the time, but it didn't. We were caught up in a state of fear. And I think it's very, very important that these conversations are happening. It's very noticeable to me, though, in relation to this particular story, that this, despite being published on a big New Zealand mainstream media outlet, I would call the reception, publication and promotion of this, if you like, by the rest of the media to be rather muted. There just has not been the spotlight on this research that I think there really should have been. And I suspect I know the reason why. I suspect that you probably know the reason why as well. However, the other thing to note about all of this is that this is not some sort of weird conspiracy theory outfit that has published this research or that has published this particular story. This is not basementdwellerswortheories.com. It's not tinfoilhatsr us NZ, it's not the association of societies who oppose vaccines and vaccine mandates. No, nothing like that at all. This is the Auckland University of Technology for researchers we'll hear about at the end, who are qualified people and who are specialists in their field who conducted this research. And it was published by none other than Radio New Zealand here in Ayotero, New Zealand. So let's jump in and have a look at what the research has found during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic policy was being made in cris management mode. Decisions had to be made faster than usual, and there was limited ability to undertake wider consultation and impact analysis. Now the worst of the pandemic is over. We have the luxury of being able to reflect on what worked well and what did not. Before we go any further, I think it's important to point out something here. I don't think the authors, because the authors of this article are the authors of the study, and I don't think they're intending this. What I suspect they are doing here is they are trying to, with these opening couple of sentences, they're trying to say to their fellow healthcare professionals, hey, look, we're not here to judge anybody. We acknowledge there was this sort of state of panic and crisis, et cetera, and that decisions were made and they weren't good. But we need to acknowledge now that they weren't good and we need to look back and we need to recognize that and we need to learn from them. So I think it's basically a sort of opening salvo to try and not alienate people who need to carry on reading what they've actually got to say. However, the unintended consequence of this, regardless of what the intention was, is this is actually a form of what we would call psychological or emotional priming. Before we've even got to the substance of what they are about to tell us, we, the audience, the readers, are being primed psychologically and emotionally about how to think about what comes next. As I said, I don't necessarily think this was their intention in this case. I think this was an attempt to try and perhaps build some rapport and build some bridges that might then lead to a deeper and important conversation. But the unintentional side effect is it does have a priming effect on people. And the priming effect in this case is not particularly good, because the priming effect here is that it actually makes people potentially look at the information that comes next and downplay the severity of this, or downplay or even miss the fact that it's not actually correct to talk about decisions being made in the heat of the moment and to be talking about crisis mode. And now that the pandemic's over, we've got the luxury of thinking, well, I think that at the very least, there are some, what I would call questionable claims there. I actually think there are some pretty serious moral claims being made there that don't really stack up. So at the very least, I think there are some questionable claims that have been made here in these opening couple of sentences. And I'll tell you what I mean by that. First of all, the data we had, the research we had, and we've had this for decades, showed us that in actual fact, vaccine mandates, like if you mandate, if you try and compel people, if you use the stick instead of the carrot when it comes to vaccination, you actually produce negative consequences. When it comes to vaccine uptake, you actually reduce vaccine uptake by doing that. And we knew that for decades before the Covid-19 pandemic even happened. So you can't really say, well, this was an experimental policy. We didn't really know. We had to try something because the thing that we did, we already knew from research, actually doesn't work to do what it was supposed to do, which was increase vaccination rates. There's also the fact that the vaccine mandates did not happen early in the pandemic. There's also the fact that the pandemic went on for many, many months. So this wasn't simply like a one week, two week, two month, three month massive sort of crisis that afflicted us. This was something that went on and on. So we actually had quite a lot of time to contemplate actions. And in particular, the vaccine mandates, they did not come in quickly. They came many months into the pandemic. And so there was actually time to contemplate. And so I think this idea of talking about having the luxury now that the pandemic is over is actually problematic because we really actually had that option during the pandemic period because it lasted so long and because the vaccine mandates came later. And more importantly, I don't actually think it is or should ever be a luxury to reflect on the implications, the moral implications, and the moral philosophy in particular around particular actions. I think it's precisely when you are in moments of crisis that you need to draw on a strong ethical tradition in order to inform the decisions that you make. This is where cris situations spiral out of control. It's where the ethical framework is thrown right out of the window and people supersede it with things like fear or efficiency and other things like that. And so I don't think that framing this in the sort of narrative of luxury versus not having a luxury, to me, it seems like these are priorities that should actually have been applied. Like I said, in this case, I don't think they are intending to downplay the severity of what comes next or the importance of it, but it has that unintentional side effect of psychologically priming people to sort of perhaps put the information they're about to read next in a perhaps lesser light or say, oh, well, yeah, that just happened, but it was a crisis. And it sort of gives us an out when we really need to actually own what happened here and be honest about the serious mistakes that were made. One of the more controversial policies implemented during the height of the pandemic was the vaccine mandates. Thousands of workers across a range of professions had to get vaccinated to keep their jobs. So this is great, by the way, to actually see finally in black and white print in a mainstream media outlet the acknowledgment that vaccine mandates were a form of coercion, that people were actually told, if you don't get this vaccine, you will lose your livelihood, your ability to support yourself and your family, potentially if you have a family. So this was a very serious consequence. It was a very serious form of coercion. And at last, it's there in black and white admission that in actual fact, thousands of people across a range of professions had to get vaccinated or they would lose their jobs. They were threatened with their jobs. Now, I think it's important to point out here, too, just to remind people there is a massive moral difference, and this is a confusion that people had at the time. So I think this is why it's important to point this out. There is a massive moral difference between a situation where you apply for a job, let's say, border control agent, and they tell you that there are a list of requirements you have to meet in order to get the job. And one of those requirements might be a schedule of vaccinations that you have had to had in order to get the job. And so if you turn around then in that situation and say, oh, they're forcing me to get vaccinated, they're coercing me, they're pressuring me. I'm sorry, but that is simply not true because they're not doing that. You have an option in that situation. You don't have the job. You've applied for the job. These are the requirements of the job. No one is forcing you to do that. If you want the job, then you will conform to the requirements. Now, that's not the situation we saw during the mandates. And this is the problem. A lot of people confused these two situations. And we regularly heard this kind of comparison being made between someone who applies for a job as a border worker or whatever it might be, and is told, here's the requirements, get a vaccination, and then tries to turn around and say, oh, this is coercion. Which it wouldn't be. And someone in the actual situation we saw, which was, let's say you actually were already employed as a border control agent. You had conformed to all of the requirements to get the job. And then all of a sudden, your employer comes to you in the middle of Covid-19 and then says to you, you must now get a Covid-19 vaccination, a vaccination that also is a type of medical technology that is new and we don't have good long term data about. But you must get this, otherwise we will sack you, you will lose your livelihood. Now that is a form of coercion. The person has a job, they have a livelihood. And I think even worse, in the middle of a pandemic, it's not like you're going to leave one job and easily find work somewhere else. In most cases, that just wasn't going to happen for people in that particular period. So there was even more added pressure. That is coercion. That's a very different situation to a person who is saying, I don't want to conform to your rule, stop coercing me, versus someone who says, hey, hold on a minute. I have conformed. I've done everything asked me, but now you are asking me to go above and beyond with an experimental medical technology, and I actually don't want to give my consent to that, for whatever reason. That is a very different ethical situation altogether. And that's why there was absolutely coercion. And to make matters worse, in most cases, there were other ways to actually keep people safe that did not require a coerced vaccination. So you could have had regular testing regimes for those who weren't vaccinated, for example. And in that case, in actual fact, people who were not vaccinated, who were taking regular Covid tests would have actually been safer than people who were vaccinated and who weren't doing that. Because the people who were unvaccinated, who were regularly checking for whether or not they had Covid, would know sooner that they had the disease, and then they could withdraw themselves from the general population, and they could therefore create a transmission barrier between them and the general population, whereas people who got vaccinated and who they could still get Covid would not know potentially until they actually were symptomatic. And at that point, they could well have exposed a lot more people. So this whole thing was a mess. And it's why this kind of comparison doesn't work. It's also why the other type of suggestion, we heard people say things like, well, they're not holding you down, which people thought that's what was meant when they talked about forcing people to get vaccinated. They thought they were literally going to strap you down to a gurney and inject you against your will. No, it's coercion we're talking about here. People being forced under threat. We will under duress.
[00:14:59] We demand a thing of you and if you don't do it, you lose your job. Our research looked at whether these vaccine mandates increased Covid-19 vaccination rates among these workers and what their employment, earnings and workplace experiences were. The stated purpose of the mandates was to increase vaccination rates among these workers to ensure the continuity of public services. Now this is a really important sentence. Remember it. We're going to come back and talk about this particular point. The stated purpose of the mandates was to increase vaccination rates among these workers to ensure the continuity of public services. In reality, the mandates had limited effect on increasing vaccine uptake, but they had a substantive negative effect on the employment, earnings and well being of unvaccinated health workers. Vaccination rates among healthcare, education and corrections workers were already high when the government announced the mandates in October 2021. So that's important. Right before the mandates even have arrived, the vaccination rates amongst these key groups were already high. I think there's several factors at play here. I think by this stage, and you might have forgotten this, but if you hearken back to it, I think you'll quickly remember our government was obsessed with its whole zero COVID policy. It was getting global attention for it. There was an intense state of fear as well, still circulating about COVID a really quite irrational state of fear, it's fair to say. And that public frenzy, that obsession on zero Covid, none of this really helped. And that quickly morphed into an intense obsession on getting this really high vaccination rate. There were also claims being made about vaccinations that weren't correct. Like you'll remember the claim was being made that they would stop transmission and we'll probably talk more about that in just a second. But all of that sort of played into this particular policy being made. And the key point here is the fact that you've already got high rates of vaccination amongst these groups that you are targeting with these particular mandates. You've really got to ask what on earth justified this policy, especially in light of decades old research showing us that this is not a good way to go about things. Almost 90% of healthcare workers and 86% of corrections workers had already received two doses of the vaccine. This is before mandates. The share among education workers was somewhat lower, but not much. It's only 82% for them now. 82%, though, is massive. It's huge. So basically, for healthcare workers, only one out of ten at that stage had not been vaccinated. It's almost one out of ten for corrections workers as well. Teachers. It's closer to two out of ten who were not vaccinated. But still eight out of ten teachers were vaccinated. Double boosted. But that's double boosted. No, that's not right. Double double shots, double vaccinated at that. I'm not even sure the correct terminology anymore. It's all a blur, but you know what I mean. But they also did not have early access to the vaccine. There were only six weeks before the vaccine becoming available to everyone over twelve years and mandates being announced. So in other words, the government didn't even give breathing space to see what would actually happen. They just announced a mandate as if somehow this was necessary, when in actual fact they already had high rates of vaccination and the vaccine was only fresh off the boat. They didn't even give it time to basically boil, come to the boil and allow people to make the choice to go and get vaccinated. They just rushed in with this policy. While vaccination rates amongst those mandated workers did increase after the mandates were announced. This is important. The data shows a continuation of an upward trend rather than a jump in uptake. So in other words, what you'd be looking for to say while the mandates were this really effective tool was you'd be looking for the vaccination rates to have stalled. And then all of a sudden you introduce a mandate and then bang, they jump, they start climbing again. That's not what they saw. Instead, there was an upward trend. The trend just carried on and the mandates just happened alongside the upward trend. They weren't the cause of it, is what they're suggesting here. It will not surprise anyone that people do not like being told what to do. And this appears to have some bearing on mandatory vaccine uptake. One thing I'll say here is that regardless of what the data shows, whether or not vaccine mandates actually suddenly forced the vaccination rate up after it installed, or whether they are a continuation, and whether or not you are framing this as people don't like being told what to do, there's actually deeper issues here. So even if you could say, well look, the vaccine mandates did cause the vaccination rates to suddenly start climbing again. Just because you get a good outcome, that doesn't mean that the method that you're using is actually morally acceptable. That's number one, it wouldn't suddenly make mandates right? And number two, if you want to frame it in this way, I think it's important to recognize that this is not simply a matter of being pig headed stubborn liberals. It's not just a matter of people saying, well, I don't want to do this, man, you can't tell me what to do. I'm not going to clean my room. They're not just sort of overblown, overgrown teenagers and that's what that sort of seems to imply. There's actually important moral principles here about bodily integrity and the coercion of adult persons who are capable of reasoning and making a free and independent decision about medical care and what sort of therapies they will undertake. And it's a really, really important area of medical ethics that they're dealing with here. It's not simply people saying, oh, I don't want to do what you're going to tell me to do here. One german survey found just over 3% of people said they would not want the Covid-19 vaccination if it was voluntary. So I'll say that again, just over 3% of people said they would not want the vaccine if it was voluntary. But, and this is the important bit, more than 16% said they would not want to get vaccinated if it was mandatory. And this is data, as I said, that we've known for a long time now, we've known, this is well established that if you try and use a stick to get people vaccinated like you punish them for not being vaccinated, you get worse outcomes, you get lower vaccination rates than if you try and use the carrot. So education, encouragement, et cetera, et cetera. And so we knew this already. This is not and should not be shocking. And this is exactly what this german survey is just confirming once again, that when you coerce people you create suspicion and you create an oppositional climate of mistrust.
[00:21:51] A consequence of vaccine mandates is that they can erode trust. Well that's exactly what I was just saying in government, and provoke more resistance. This erosion of trust could potentially strengthen antivaccination sentiment generally and reduce uptake not just of Covid-19 vaccinations but also other vaccines. This outcome is especially concerning given research has found New Zealand's routine childhood immunization rates have decreased since the pandemic. And this is something really, really important. That what you do when you introduce a mandate like this is you don't just create a problem in relation to Covid-19 vaccines. You now create a climate of mistrust. And when you are punishing people like this, and when you do the things that our government did with this policy, you then end up with the likes of the parliamentary protest. You actually create social problems. And those problems aren't just ended quickly. The parliamentary protest, relatively speaking, came to a conclusion, and rather quickly in the scheme of human history. But there are other serious problems that are still with us. And one of those is the fact that we have strong anecdotal evidence now linking vaccine mandates around Covid to a general suspicion amongst some communities that has now caused a resistance to other vaccines as well. And why this is really, really important is because one of those diseases where we've got a real potential risky flashpoint right now is measles. And that's serious, because measles, unlike Covid, is far more contagious and it can kill a lot more people and do other really serious harms that Covid didn't do because it was confined to a relatively smaller category of risky demographics. So a smaller group of people who were actually at the most risk, most people would simply experience a cold or flu like experience of COVID without any of the other serious outcomes the older people were, or people with obesity issues, or people who had comorbidities like they already had immune related issues, they were at risk, but most other people weren't. Well, measles is not like that. And on top of that, measles, as I said, is far more contagious. And we've got a really serious problem right now with a lowered rate of vaccination for that particular disease. In addition to not causing noticeable increase in vaccination rates, the mandates also had negative consequences for the employment and earnings of the unvaccinated health workers. Their employment rate fell by 15% and their earnings fell by 19%, compared with vaccinated health workers and those not subject to the mandates. Even after the health worker mandates were lifted in September 2022, the employment and earnings of unvaccinated workers never fully recovered. So that's important. These are people who have not got back to the same amount of earnings, the same income that they were relying on to support themselves and their household. It's never come back to what it was for them. This exacerbated existing health worker shortages. Closed borders and a global shortage of healthcare workers meant fewer moved into the health sector compared with the number leaving. Now, remember that sentence I told you to remember earlier about the fact that these vaccine mandates, the stated purpose of the mandates was to increase vaccination rates among those workers to ensure the continuity of public services. Well, guess what? The vaccine mandates did not achieve what was their primary stated aim. So as you can see here, this actually created a shortage of healthcare workers who were pushed out of the healthcare profession. And so this had a bearing upon the continuity of services and the ability to deliver the same level of services that we had going into the pandemic. But also, you remember, the government implemented other policies like mandatory standouts. So they said to people, remember, if you got Covid, you had to stay home? Was it, I think five. I can't even remember the exact amount of days now, but it was basically a week in total that most people would be off work. If you tested and found you had Covid, you took yourself out of the general population. And that makes sense, by the way. That's actually an effective way of limiting the spread of disease, is to actually, if you're sick, to pull yourself out of the general population, far more effective way of actually dealing with this particular issue. But the point is this. When you are saying to a healthcare worker, if you get Covid, then you have to step out of frontline service for a week. Continuity of service is disrupted. And the problem was the vaccine never actually prevented transmission, and it never stopped you from actually catching COVID So vaccine mandates were never actually going to bring about that result when you couple them with a policy that says you have to stand down compulsorily from your workplace for a week. So what happens is the vaccine doesn't stop you getting Covid, you get Covid. And yes, you might have a blunted experience, so you don't get the worst excesses of COVID but you've still got to stay home and leave the front lines of health work. And so you're still disrupting continuity of service. The vaccine mandates have not actually delivered on the fundamental promise. This whole thing, effectively, when you look at it, is a combination of policies or a policy making mess, really. The effect of the mandates on health workers also went beyond financial consequences. Affected health workers talked to us about the loss and ongoing trauma that they have experienced. Those opposed to mandates are often incorrectly labeled as antivaxxers or even conspiracy theorists. And can I say that for myself? I'm not a healthcare worker. But I have had to put up with a constant slew of this same allegation and this same derogatory slur being made against me. Every time I published something about the ethics and the morality of mandates and these particular policies, I would get backlash from people who would wrongly accuse me of being an antivaxxer or a conspiracy theorist. This was just nonsense, but it still keeps happening. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago here on the podcast, I talked about that brand new and massive global study which found that the rates of negative effects caused by, like, harmful effects caused by the Covid-19 vaccines was higher than expected. Substantially higher than expected, according to the researchers who conducted that research. And despite the fact that in that podcast, I clearly pointed out that the researchers themselves, in their own words, said that the risks from the Covid-19 vaccine, some of these risks were still present in Covid-19 and were shown to be higher in Covid-19 so if you got Covid-19 the key point was that the vaccines themselves had higher negative impacts than what was actually expected. So there was a real problem here. There's an experimental nature to therapy, all that kind of stuff. Now, after publishing that episode, I had someone who I know who means well, but who messaged me the following, and I'm going to change this person's name for the sake of charity. Hi Brendan. I see you seem to be leaning into the anti vax narrative. Still. This is unfortunate, in my view. I think it's clickbait and misinformation. This is a thread with some useful info, and there was a link to a thread about the study because the person had not actually listened to my podcast, by the way, and they had wrongly assumed that I had not read widely about the study, and I was not actually quoting the researchers themselves.
[00:29:59] It's quite amazing, right? Here's someone accusing me of things, and they haven't even listened to what I've actually said. If you're going to discuss vaccine risks, I hope you'll do it accurately and also accurately discuss risks from COVID infection. Well, again, if they'd listened to my podcast, they would have known that I did that. And this is my reply, because I replied to this person and then left it at that. Now they came back with another reply, another lengthy sort of diatribe. I just ignored the second one because I'd said my piece. This is what I said. You're a good man, Bob. And that's a name change for those who haven't figured that out. You're a good man, Bob, but you need to stop with the baseless allegations and unfounded assumptions about my motives. I am not anti vaxx, and the latest podcast episode used a left wing media report which twice highlighted the previous studies which point to an increased risk of these conditions from COVID infection itself. As I said in the podcast, that's not really a helpful narrative in this case, though, because one of the key findings of this study was the adverse effects from the vaccines, and they were significantly higher than expected, which points to the lack of reliable data given to people when they were making their decisions. And it also highlights the moral problems with mandating and or taking punitive measures against people for choosing not to get the vaccine when the risk levels were not properly established. You might disagree with the moral claims I am putting forward, but you are simply wrong if you are trying to claim that they are anti vax or anti science in Christ. Brendan and for those who are wondering, yes, I do sign most of my correspondence off in Christ because I am a Christian. So that's why I do that. It's a good reminder to myself and to the other person that I'm trying not to be hostile towards them. But anyway, that's an example of exactly what has been talked about in this article. People just assume that if you want to talk reasonably and rationally and explore the moral questions involved here, and look honestly and frankly at all the data with a reasoned and experienced mind. So I've lived long enough on this earth now to understand that corporations who are receiving large sums of money, their motives are often not pure. And if you have lived long enough, you know that there are certain, I would call it natural wisdom you gain from the world that should be applied in these circumstances. So when you want to talk about these issues in light of that, all of a sudden you're an antivaxxer? You're a conspiracy theorist. No, I don't believe a conspiracy theory about these vaccines. I'm not antivaccination. I have been vaccinated. All our kids are vaccinated. And in fact, when we had the problem with the measles outbreak, was it 2019? I think it was in New Zealand, just before COVID I went and got a booster for my measles vaccine because it had been so long since my childhood vaccination. So, no, I am not antivaxx. And neither are these people who looked at the data, looked at the information, and made a decision according to the best available reasoning. And remember, we're talking here about health workers, too. These are not people who are just plucking information out of thin air off weird conspiracy sites. All health workers we spoke to were pro vaccination, but had legitimate reasons for not completing or struggling to complete the required vaccinations. They had researched the vaccine and made informed decisions based on their circumstances. Some health workers pointed out that the case for mandates was not strong based on available evidence. While the vaccine reduces symptom severity, its ability to prevent transmission is currently limited. And this is a key point. Why were our government leaders making this claim that it would prevent transmission? We know now that Pfizer never tested for transmission blocking efficacy of the vaccine. Yet despite that fact, remember, we were told constantly that this would block transmission. So where did that information come from? Did they just make that up? Were they just hoping that would be the case? This is really quite astounding when you think about that point. As one health worker said, I looked at the australian data and couldn't see the logic of me potentially being exposed to another vaccine where my potential benefit was so low. The evidence wasn't really strong. Some workers had health conditions that put them at elevated risk from the vaccine, or they had a history of adverse reactions to vaccines. But the mandates meant they either had to get vaccinated, sometimes against their doctor's advice, or lose their jobs. While some medical exemptions were available, the threshold for those was very high. And this is absolutely astounding when you think about this. These are health workers who are weighing the benefits and who have a history of adverse reactions, or they have health conditions that put them at elevated risk from the vaccine. And their own doctors are saying, we advise you not to do this. And what some government bureaucrat says, no, you must still get vaccinated. That, my friends, is the problem with managerialism. In a nutshell. Bureaucrats who think they know more because they've created a process and a system, and they think they actually know more. That is not helping the world. Managerialism is doing so much harm, and that is a great example of it right there. A health worker with actual histories or conditions that will create risk for that person from the vaccine and their own doctors are saying, don't do this. And still the bureaucrats say, no, you must get vaccinated or you will lose your job.
[00:35:21] That's managerialism. Not only is it quite irrational, but it is also quite heartless. In addition, even those with medical exemptions faced stigma. One health worker who got an exemption after suffering a stroke following their vaccination. So, I mean, this is like, this is crazy. This is not someone who's just saying, oh, I wonder if I can fool the system and they'll give me the exemption pass. This is someone who had a stroke following their vaccination, and they get an exemption. And then they say this. This person described people's reactions upon showing them the exemption. That look on people's faces, it was disgust. It was really, really awful. As another health worker explained, we're supposed to be a caring profession. Nothing about this is caring. Due to no fault of my own, I have now been labeled an antivaxxer and antiscience, and in some people's opinion, not worthy of calling myself a nurse. This hurts me immensely. This is what mandates have done. There is no room for individual circumstances. And that's such a key point, because this is the massive failure. Again, this is managerialism in a nutshell. You create a bureaucratic policy and then you demand that everyone conform to it. It's a form of ideological utopianism, the belief that the human person is malleable, that we're all just the same. We're all just interchangeable units, when in actual fact, we're not. Every human person is unique. They have their own unique physiology, biological histories, medical histories, family histories. They have their own unique set of circumstances when it comes to medicine and their health. And all of that was thrown completely out the window. It is just crazy when you think about what happened here. And not only that, we didn't even properly stratify the risks from COVID itself. Covid was not an equal opportunity employer. It was not a socialist. Everyone didn't get the same payout. In the end. Some people had it worse than others, depending on what demographic they fell into. There was, and there should have been a proper stratified risk categorization that went on where we said, well, people in this group are at higher risk than these other people, and so we shouldn't be treating everyone as if they are all at equal and high risk. That was never the case, and it never should have been done. The people we spoke with said they lost their sense of control and it eroded their trust in the health system and government. Well, that's exactly what managerialism will do. It will make you very cynical about the world, because, as I said, it's very uncaring and you can't deal with the person. What happens is you get people who are obsessed with process, and they become a walking, talking deliverer, servant of processes. They just become a mouthpiece for a process, and it's dehumanizing. And you can see why people actually lose their trust in health and in the government in situations like this. What does this tell us about the use of vaccine mandates during future pandemics? In the context of high voluntary compliance, mandates should be used judiciously. Mandating something is not always the most effective way to get people to do something for the greater good. Well, in actual fact, in this case, as I said, we know that if you use a stick rather than a carrot when it comes to vaccinations, you don't get the result that you want. And there's a kind of irony here, too, because I guarantee you, if there was a mass outbreak of, I don't know, something like Ebola, which is very infectious and has a high fatality rate and does awful things to people, then I guarantee you that you would see a massive uptake in any vaccination that was produced that would vaccinate you against Ebola. People would be rushing out. They'd be running over each other. They'd be pushing and shoving in the chemist aisles to get that vaccine. It would be that simple. You wouldn't need a mandate because it would be so obvious that the harms were serious. The risk was real, people would act accordingly. That's the irony here, that the more serious the situation, that's when you don't actually need the mandates. The less serious situation where there was stratified risk. Not everyone was equal risk. The risks were relatively low. They weren't zero and they weren't nonexistent, but they're relatively low. We use mandates.
[00:39:39] The whole thing is sort of disordered. It's a lack of proper moral reasoning. It's a lack of careful consideration. That's exactly what led to this situation. During the Covid-19 pandemic, a strong motivator for vaccination was the feel good factor of knowing you were protecting yourself and others, ironically. Well, in actual fact, you weren't protecting others, were you? Because, again, we were told that, remember? But we know now, Pfizer never tested for that. The vaccine never stopped transmission. So you getting a vaccine didn't actually prevent transmission to another person if you contracted Covid. Ironically, the increase in distrust that resulted from the use of mandates in the Covid-19 pandemic may actually lower voluntary vaccine uptake in future pandemics. Well, again, I would say that if the pandemic was serious enough, it won't have any bearing at all. People will see and they will act. It's probably that simple. As one health worker summed it up, someone who's been vaccinated badly. The trauma of that, it's not just them. It's their entire social circle. It's their entire far. Now you're seeding distrust in the health system, not just for COVID vaccinations, but the whole system, everything to do with medicine and the whole immunization program. If there's a policy that's as big as a mandate for a whole population or health professionals, you really need to think about what are the unintended consequences? And I would say that's a very fierce summation. I know people who, as I'm reading that paragraph, I am imagining in my mind people I know who went from people who were generally what you would say, very trusting, very typical Kiwis to, as a result of the mandates and as a result of experiences they had, they now have a serious lack of trust in the system. And some people, sadly, even have devolved into quite extreme conspiratorial thinking about all of these issues as a direct result of this. This was not a good thing. It did serious social harm. That's still with us. If you're in a christian community, you will remember that there were people weaponizing spirituality. There were these spiritual abuses going on around COVID vaccine mandates, and people were telling you that you didn't love Jesus and you didn't love your neighbor if you didn't get the vaccine. That was absolutely shocking. Weaponized spirituality. It was just madness what happened here. And it is great at last to see some acknowledgment, to see some research being done, to see the mainstream media actually reporting about these issues. Because hopefully this can lead us to a serious public conversation where we say, you know what? We must not do this again. We must learn from this mistake. And no, I'm not a utopianist, so I am very well aware that we are typically bad at learning from history as human beings. So I don't expect a miracle here. But I still am a hopeful man that maybe we can learn something, that there can be an acknowledgment, that there can be, at least amongst some communities, a recognition that, you know what? We need to actually make an apology to people for the way that they were treated, because what we did wasn't actually right. And hopefully we can all consider a bit more about whether or not next time something like this, a massive crisis hits us, we need to actually stop, take a breath, and start making decisions based on sound moral reasoning and not based on fear and blind panic, because that's what happened too much during the Covid-19 period. And remember that pandemic period went on for months. And so it's not like we didn't have time to actually take the breath. We just chose to remain in a frenzied state of fear. It was almost like a form of psychological, sociological possession happened where we just fell lockstep into it and we were just obsessed with whatever the managerial, bureaucratic classes were telling us to do. We were almost like, well, I can outdo that. You're saying I can only have two people over to my house. I'll only have one person over to my house. You're saying that I can report people if I think that they're breaking the COVID rules? Well, guess what? We'll break the COVID Dobbin, your neighbor hotline within a matter of hours of going live. That's what happened in that situation. So maybe, just maybe, some of us can learn from that. And I know, talking to people, that there are a lot of people out there who have regrets now about decisions they made and about the way they treated other people and about the fact that they did just fall lockstep into line with this without actually stopping and being more humane and more considerate in their approach. Just to finish with, let me leave you with the final statement at the end of this article from Radio New Zealand, which lists the researchers and their qualifications. Jan Diwa is head of nursing at Auckland University of Technology. Denise Wilson is associate dean of maori advancement and professor of Maori Health at Auckland University of Technology. Gail Pacheco is professor of economics and director of the New Zealand Work Research Institute at Auckland University of Technology. And Lisa Meen is deputy director of the New Zealand Work Research Institute at Auckland University of Technology. Just so you know that these people are not slouchers. They are not basement dwellers wearing tinfoil hats, tapping away on their mummy's keyboard about the great and evil vaccine. These are reasonable people who are experts in their field, who have done the proper due diligence to understand the data and hear from the people on the front lines. Because, by the way, this is another side effect, a negative fruit of managerialism. We obsess about data and we forget about persons. It's really both that you need to look at. Thanks once again for tuning in. Don't forget that if you want that daily episode of the Dispatchers podcast, daily commentary and insights and considerations about the state of affairs in our world and important topics, go to patreon.com left foot media and sign up as a $5 monthly patron. Also, please don't forget that if you are able to on your platform, wherever you're listening right now, if you can give us a rating, a review, some stars, all of that really, really helps. And if you like what you heard here today, please subscribe. Thanks again for tuning in. Don't forget, live by goodness, truth and beauty, not by lies. And I will see you next time on the dispatchers.
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