Roderick Mulgan: The Medical Council Has Gone Too Far -" We're Saying No!"

This email from the Free Speech Union seeks your support:

Hi Peter, The Medical Council of New Zealand (MCNZ) has proposed that treating patients well is no longer enough.   Your doctor must also hold the correct views. This is a substantial change – and as a GP with nearly 40 years’ experience in medicine – let me tell you, Peter, it sends shivers down my spine. Doctors are being told they must now accept that colonisation - present tense, ongoing - is why Māori can't access healthcare, and that it is their professional duty to challenge the "systemic bias within the system”. If they don't? Their practising certificate could be on the line. I'm Dr Roderick Mulgan - GP, barrister, and International Director of the Free Speech Union. I've read these draft standards with both hats on. As a doctor, I know what good patient care looks like. As a barrister, I know what the law requires. These standards go beyond both. The consultation closes 24 March. The Medical Council needs to hear from you. Make a submission to MCNZ today It takes minutes. We've made it easy. More on that below. What doctors must now believe The draft standards on "cultural competence, cultural safety, and hauora Māori" read less like a regulatory document and more like a postgraduate ideology course. Doctors must accept that: the health system is built on oppressive "settler traditions"; colonisation is the reason Māori can't access health resources; patients are entitled to equitable outcomes across identity groups (somehow); doctors must use their professional influence to actively "dismantle unfair systems;" that doctors should challenge colleagues who do not embrace this approach. Which are all funny things to put in a medical standards document. You might agree with some of this. You might agree with all of it. That's beside the point. The question is whether a medical regulator can turn highly contested political opinions into compulsory professional doctrine - backed by the threat of deregistration. What the law actually says - and what happens in a consultation room As a barrister: the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act requires doctors to demonstrate cultural competence, including respectful interaction with Māori. That's it. No ideological extremism. No activist roles. No dismantling.  This is yet another clear-cut case of a regulator trying to impose powers beyond what the legislation allows them. The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act protects not only the right to speak freely, but the right not to be compelled to say things you don't believe. What the Council is proposing is compelled belief, dressed up as professional development. As a doctor what matters when a patient walks through my door is whether: I'm listening carefully, examining competently, diagnosing accurately, treating effectively. Whether I hold the Council's approved position on colonisation has precisely nothing to do with any of that. On Friday, I was on The Platform talking about the MCNZ.   The chilling effect nobody's talking about Free Speech Union Council Member Ani O'Brien made a sharp observation earlier in the week: once disagreement with a framework is treated as evidence of the very problem it describes, recertification stops being about clinical skill. It becomes a test of whether you've learned to say the right things. The real danger isn't dramatic purges. It's quieter. Doctors will learn the language. They'll stop saying what they actually think - not because they've been persuaded, but because they have mortgages and families. A culture of inquiry becomes a culture of compliance. Good medicine depends on doctors who think critically, question assumptions, and follow the evidence. These standards would replace that with ideological conformity. What you can do The Free Speech Union is conducting a full legal analysis and will submit before the deadline. But this consultation is open to everyone - and the Council needs to hear from more than just the institutions already nodding along. If you think doctors should be judged on the quality of their care - not the orthodoxy of their politics - make a submission. Make a submission to MCNZ today Consultation documents are available here.  The deadline is 24 March. That's soon. The Medical Council's job is to ensure clinical competence and patient safety. Not to run a political education programme for the medical profession. Let's remind them of that. Best wishes,

"Like so many of the Trump administration’s actions, this is simultaneously weird, dangerous, and profoundly stupid. And we are all going to pay the price for it."

"Last night brought news that the US Food & Drug Agency (FDA) has refused to review Moderna’s application for their new mRNA influenza vaccine ...  Right off, let’s just make clear that an outright refusal-to-review rejection like this is quite unusual ... especially unusual for a vaccine. If there is a prior example like this with the FDA, I am unaware of it. ...

"[T]his application is being denied personally by Vinay Prasad [an anti-vaxxer appointed by RFK Jr to be the agency's top vaccine regulator] and against the recommendation of the FDA’s remaining experts, because he and the rest of the Trump administration are hostile to vaccines in general and to mRNA technology in particular. I don’t see how anyone can look at the statements and actions of the political appointees (from RFK Jr. on down) and come away with any other impression. We are deliberately walking away from the most advanced form of one of the most effective public health measures available to the human race, and instead we are investigated older technologies that happen to involve the administration’s friends. Meanwhile, mRNA therapies are under investigation - in more advanced parts of the world - for far more than vaccines, including various types of cancer. But we, on the other hand, seem to be plowing money into ivermectin (of all things) for that purpose.

"Like so many of the Trump administration’s actions, this is simultaneously weird, dangerous, and profoundly stupid. And we are all going to pay the price for it."

~ Derek Lowe from his post 'An mRNA Refusal to File' [hat tip Duncan B.]

Testing

"After 8 billion doses (yes 8 BILLION, not a typo) Covid vaccines are at this point one of the most tested medical interventions in history and one of the safest ever."

~ Dr Neil Stone

"mRNA vaccines weren’t the problem. The virus was."

In the very first large study of long-term mortality by vaccination status—assessing the impact of COVID-19 mRNA vaccination among French adults aged 18 to 59—French scientists found there was "no increased risk of 4-year all-cause mortality in individuals aged 18 to 59 years vaccinated against COVID-19, further supporting the safety of the mRNA vaccines that are being widely used worldwide."

Their research with 22.7 million vaccinated individuals and 5.9 million unvaccinated individuals found that "vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19, and no increased risk of all-cause mortality over a median follow-up of 45 months."  

This is the largest study of this kind in the world, and the results are significant. (There was a large Japanese study during the Omicron wave, which earlier vaccines had some trouble covering. This did see an increase in mortality in the over-70s which didn't discriminate towards vaccinated or non-vaccinated.). 

Blogger with the unfortunate name of Snarky Gherkin summarises the French results:

This study used real-world national health data... not surveys, not estimates, not “my cousin’s friend is a nurse on Rumble", not laminated placards of nocebo hysteria. 

They followed 22.7 million vaccinated adults and 5.9 million unvaccinated adults aged 18–59, median follow-up 45 months (nearly 4 years). 

They matched the groups on age, sex, region and over 41 health conditions (so it was adjusted for comorbidities). 

Then they looked at hard endpoints such as all-cause mortality, COVID-related mortality and long-term mortality trends.
The Findings...

• Vaccinated people had 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19.
• 25% lower risk of death from ANY cause.
• No increase in mortality for 4 years after vaccination.
• Results held even after excluding COVID deaths.

What this means... if vaccines were causing secret waves of heart attacks, cancers, turbo-autoimmune-disasters… we would absolutely see it here. 

Instead, vaccinated people (on average) lived longer. 

The authors did note that vaccinated groups had slightly more cardiometabolic issues,
yet still had better outcomes. (That’s the opposite of “healthier people bias.”) 

This is one of the strongest long-term safety signals ever conducted and released.
Link here, have a read. 

Summary: 

mRNA vaccines weren’t the problem.
The virus was.

Feel free to question the summer-upper. And/or read the full research.

Real Public Health Threats vs. Climate Hysteria: "It is vital that governments focus on real pollutants, not imagined ones."

"Relying on human ingenuity to coexist with a changing climate – either warmer or cooler – and tending to long-recognised public health threats are the best ways to ensure the well-being of the planet and its inhabitants, according to an Australian physician and expert in climate and public health.

“The ingenuity of Homo sapiens at adapting to climate has permitted people to populate almost the entire globe from the freezing Arctic to the steamy tropics, notes Dr. D. Weston Allen, lead author of a paper supporting a proposed repeal of a federal designation of carbon dioxide (CO2) as a pollutant. 'If we stick to doing what we do best – adaptation – we will continue to thrive.' ...

"[C]civilisations did well in past eras of relative warmth during Minoan and Roman times and the Medieval Warm Period. And, he says, cool periods often brought suffering, the most recent being the Little Ice Age, which experienced 'frequent widespread crop failures, mass starvation, disease and depopulation.' ...

"Although activists claim that warming will spread tropical diseases into temperate zones, malaria, once widespread in Europe and North America, declined because of public health measures such as draining swamps, spraying insecticides and increasing medical treatment.

"An oft-ignored fact is that cold weather is far deadlier than heat. Globally, cold kills many times more people than heat despite fearmongering about warming. Also, contrary to hyperbolic headlines, data for the last 100 years show that deaths from extreme weather have dropped by 90%.

"When policymakers focus exclusively on carbon dioxide and hypothetical climate harms, populations are denied the tools to manage real threats: infectious disease, hunger, dirty water, unsafe housing.

“ 'It is vital that governments focus on real pollutants, not imagined ones...,' writes Dr. Allen. 'Misguided climate action can be worse than unmitigated climate change.' ”

~ Gregory Wrightstone from his article 'Real Public Health Threats vs. Climate Hysteria'

FACT CHECK: "The United States is one of the only developed countries where health care is mostly left to the free market." ANSWER: FALSE

 

"Many critiques of US health care begin with the assumption that ... the United States is 'one of the only developed countries where health care is mostly left to the free market.' In truth, among wealthy nations, the United States may have one of the least-free health care markets—and it’s making health care less universal.

"In a free market, the government would control 0 percent of health spending. Yet the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports that in the United States, the government controls 84 percent of health spending. That’s a larger share than in 27 out of 38 OECD-member nations, including the United Kingdom (83 percent) and Canada (73 percent), each of which has an explicitly socialized health care system. When it comes to government control of health spending, the United States is closer to communist Cuba (89 percent) than the average OECD nation (75 percent).

"The idea that the US health sector has 'largely unregulated prices,' as the 'Los Angeles Times' has reported, is also incorrect. Direct government price-setting, price floors, and price ceilings determine prices for more than half of US health spending, including virtually all health insurance premiums.

"Many think that if prices are excessive, they must be market prices. But in the United States, government price-setting pushes health care prices higher than they would be in a free market. On top of that, the government pushes all medical prices and health insurance premiums upward through tax laws and regulations mandating excessive levels of health insurance. ...

"A few examples illustrate how frequently the government sets prices too high. ...

"US health care prices are excessive because the government intervenes. When health care operates under free-market principles, prices would fall like they do in other economic sectors, making health care increasingly more universal."

~ Michael F. Cannon from his article 'U.S. Health Care: The Free-market Myth'

FIVE YEARS AGO: Libertarian Debate Club: Virus Edition

This post from NOT PC back in 2021:

From two editions of Rob Tracinski's always excellent Letters:

If you want to get into Libertarian Debate Club with me, I will acknowledge that the government does have a proper role in a pandemic. Just as your right to swing your arms ends where your fist hits my nose, your right to liberty does not include the right to knowingly or negligently transmit a deadly disease to others. Above, I mentioned Typhoid Mary, who was involuntarily confined for 26 years because she refused to stop seeking work as a cook after being identified as an asymptomatic carrier of salmonella typhi. So government has its role in ensuring the humane quarantine of the infected.
    But that alone is not what’s going to get us through [to normal conditions], especially not at this point. What will get us through is innovation, which will be led by a dynamic private economy....
    The key word here is “normal.” As I explained, “normal” in this context is a metaphysical term. I cited what Ayn Rand had to say on this in writing about the “ethics of emergencies.”

By “normal” conditions I mean metaphysically normal, normal in the nature of things, and appropriate to human existence. Men can live on land, but not in water [i.e., a flood] or in a raging fire. Since men are not omnipotent, it is metaphysically possible for unforeseeable disasters to strike them, in which case their only task is to return to those conditions under which their lives can continue.

That is why it was so inappropriate for people to try to apply all the formulas and assumptions of our normal politics to the pandemic.
    But note the necessity of getting back to normal life as soon as possible. With vaccines now approved and being distributed ... we [can possibly] return to the metaphysics of normal life, and the only question is how soon ... it will happen. It will definitely take longer than we would like, and it will probably take longer than it has to.
    When it happens, and we finally get the all-clear on the pandemic, one consequence we will have to deal with is that the pandemic has made it more acceptable for us all to stick our noses into how other people live their lives, and some people will not want to give that up. In my overview of the political philosophy of the pandemic, I quoted British politician [Steve Baker] explaining his vote for lockdown measures but warning that it created a “dystopian society” that should not “endure one moment longer than is absolutely necessary.” I followed that with my own observation.

In the previous edition, I quoted someone who compared our response to the pandemic to Germany in the 1940s. I think that’s the wrong comparison. It’s more like America in the 1940s. Then, too, we saw a vast expansion of government power—both legitimate wartime powers and many illegitimate ones. There were those who loved the mass regimentation, the central planning, the idea of everyone drafted by the state and taking orders, and who wondered why we couldn’t keep all of that in place and apply it to other favorite causes that were “the moral equivalent of war.”

What actually happened is that the moment the war was over, the American people were incredibly eagerto get back to normal life and sweep away all vestiges of wartime regimentation.

I hope and expect the same thing to happen again.

The goal of stopping this pandemic is to return to normal life: to what is metaphysically normal, to the normal activities and goals of human life, and to the normal scope and powers of government in a free society.

That is one of the things we will be looking for in the next year: not just the end of the pandemic, but the unwinding of the social and political measures conjured up to deal with it.

Crackers

 

"And while you’re at it, stop worrying about logos and retail decor. That’s a postmodern sickness, and a total waste of time. The first step in a healthy lifetyle is ignoring anything that comes out of the advertising or marketing world."

~ Ted Gioia from his post 'We've Reached the Sad Cracker Barrel Stage of Cultural Evolution'

"AI isn't making us more productive. It's making us cognitively bankrupt."

"MIT [that's the real one, not the imposter in Manukau] just completed the first brain scan study of ChatGPT users & the results are terrifying. Turns out, AI isn't making us more productive. It's making us cognitively bankrupt. 

"Here's what 4 months of data revealed: (hint: we've been measuring productivity all wrong)

"83.3% of ChatGPT users couldn't quote from essays they wrote minutes earlier. Let that sink in. You write something, hit save, and your brain has already forgotten it because ChatGPT did the thinking.

"Brain scans revealed the damage: neural connections collapsed from 79 to just 42. That's a 47% reduction in brain connectivity. If your computer lost half its processing power, you'd call it broken. That's what's happening to ChatGPT users' brains....

"Here's the terrifying part: When researchers forced ChatGPT users to write without AI, they performed worse than people who never used AI at all. It's not just dependency. It's cognitive atrophy. Like a muscle that's forgotten how to work.

"The MIT team used EEG brain scans on 54 participants for 4 months. They tracked alpha waves (creative processing), beta waves (active thinking), and neural connectivity patterns. This isn't opinion. It's measurable brain damage from AI overuse.

"The productivity paradox nobody talks about: Yes, ChatGPT makes you 60% faster at completing tasks. But it reduces the 'germane cognitive load' needed for actual learning by 32%. You're trading long-term brain capacity for short-term speed.... Many recent studies underscore the same problem, including this one by Microsoft:

"MIT researchers call this 'cognitive debt' - like technical debt, but for your brain. Every shortcut you take with AI creates interest payments in lost thinking ability. And just like financial debt, the bill comes due eventually. But there's good news...

"Because session 4 of the study revealed something interesting: People with strong cognitive baselines showed HIGHER neural connectivity when using AI than chronic users. But chronic AI users forced to work without it? They performed worse than people who never used AI at all.

"The solution isn't to ban AI. It's to use it strategically. ... The first brain scan study of AI users just showed us the stakes. Choose wisely."

~ Alex Vacca

Canada Took the Leap on Legal Weed—Five Years Later, No Meltdown

While some US states have decriminalised recreational cannabis use, Canada fully legalised. Meanwhile, here in NZ, outside medical use the hash remains illegal. 

So how has Canada's legalisation gone? Jeffrey Singer reports in this guest post.

Canada Took the Leap on Legal Weed—Five Years Later, No Meltdown

Critics warned it would lead to widespread abuse. Yet, in October 2018, Canadian lawmakers made Canada the first G7 country to legalise, not merely decriminalise, recreational cannabis.

Researchers at McMaster University have conducted a prospective cohort study involving 1,428 adults in Hamilton, Ontario. Some participants were cannabis consumers before legalisation, while others began using cannabis post-legalisation, between September 2018 and October 2023. Their findings were published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The results:

Cannabis use frequency increased modestly in the 5 years following legalisation, while cannabis misuse decreased modestly.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, alcohol, cannabis, and illicit substance use spiked in most countries. Researchers found that after the pandemic’s onset, cannabis misuse (or cannabis use disorder) experienced a sharp reduction and has not yet returned to prior rates. The most significant drop occurred among individuals who were frequent users before legalisation.

Overall, during the study period, individuals who frequently used cannabis before legalisation tended to reduce their consumption, while those who had not previously used cannabis were more likely to increase their use. Misuse declined among all groups that were already using cannabis before legalisation. Researchers observed a rise in misuse among those who had previously abstained—an expected outcome given their zero-use baseline.

Further analyses identified significant changes in the types of cannabis products favored by active users over time, with declines in the use of dried flower, concentrates, cannabis oil, tinctures, topical ointments, and hashish. In contrast, the consumption of edibles, liquids, and cannabis oil cartridges or disposable vapes increased. The shift away from combustibles is a positive development that may reduce the likelihood of developing pulmonary health issues.

These findings suggest that cannabis legalisation may not lead to the adverse health effects that critics feared. In fact, it could promote safer consumption habits and minimise overall harm.

Canada’s experience did not result in a public health crisis. Misuse declined, safer products gained acceptance, and the situation remained stable. As US states continue to consider legalisation, the takeaway is clear: the question isn’t whether to legalise—it’s how to do it smart.

* * * * 

Jeffrey A. Singer is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, working in the Department of Health Policy Studies, and has been in private practice as a general surgeon for more than 35 years.
    He is also a visiting fellow at the Goldwater Institute in Phoenix, and a member of the Board of Scientific Advisors of the American Council on Science and Health. From 1994 to 2016, he was a regular contributor to 'Arizona Medicine,' the journal of the Arizona Medical Association. He writes and speaks extensively on regional and national public policy, with a specific focus on the areas of health care policy and the harmful effects of drug prohibition.

    His post first appeared at the Cato at Liberty blog.

"NZ urgently needs the support of retired individuals or those whose livelihoods are not yet affected by government or iwi control."

"New Zealand is facing a significant freedom of speech crisis. Across the country, people dependent on their business or employment income are being intimidated into silence regarding the influence of the tribal elite over many aspects of our lives. It’s not just about expressing personal opinions but about elected representatives, public servants and private business operators being silenced when it comes to the facts. ... [see for just a few examples: Real Estate agent Janet Dickson's court fight over licensing modules; so-called 'cultural safety' and 'cultural competence' requirements for nursing and teacher registration; 'Mātauranga Māori' being taught as science in schools; proposed 'competency standards' for pharmacists, & creeping tribal control over state assets]    

    "That’s why NZ urgently needs the support of retired individuals or those whose livelihoods are not yet affected by government or iwi control. You have the freedom to speak up for those Kiwis who feel unable to do so themselves. I encourage anyone, who can, to take up this cause, as the consequences for New Zealanders—including Māori who are not part of the leadership elite—will only worsen if this takeover continues."

~ Fiona Mackenzie from her article 'Too Intimidated to Speak Out?'

Little Nicola's report card after one year: 'Not Achieved'

 

"National was elected on the promise of fixing the economy. Not talking about it; but to deliver the goods. ... How is Finance Minister Willis doing? [Answer:] She has not yet proved herself. ...
    "[T]he Kiwi economy is stagnant ... experiencing one of the lowest GDP growth rates in the world. [I]nflation is lower, [but] it has been coming down in most nations. ... [W]e held out hope there would be a drastic reduction in red tape and regulation. However the new Department of Regulation has done next to nothing yet, other than hire managers. ... Willis has sent no clear message to the markets that hers is a government of low taxes. Quite the opposite, she has kept top tax rates the same, as well as corporate taxes. ... [yet] the fiscal deficit will [still] worsen under Willis, unless the economy starts to rapidly pick up. The trimming of civil servants, whilst necessary, is not on a scale that will greatly shift the dial. ...
    "[O]n healthcare, Willis pretends that hiring Lester Levy is a reform. Parachuting in a cost cutting manager does not constitute a health-care policy. ... [O]n housing, once the propaganda is stripped away, National's reforms offer less of an increase in supply than was going to happen under the bi-partisan accord that the Party signed up to with Labour years ago. ... National's trumpeted Fast-Track Approvals is nothing more than a rejig of the Fast-Track Approvals process Labour enacted when in office, although with a lessening of environmental checks. ...
    "Willis ... represents ... a Sir Bill English-type, a steady-as- she-goes, status-quo, old-style, conservative Nat. Maybe it worked for him. It won’t for her. It won’t for the nation. ... New thinking is required."

~ Robert MacCulloch from his post 'Finance Minister Nicola Willis: A First Year Economic Report Card'

"No culture in history contributed more to human well-being than Western civilisation, nor even as much."

 

Portrait of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his 

wife and collaborator Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze, 

Jacques-Louis David (1788)

"The charges against Western civilisation involve slavery, imperialism, and genocide. No doubt, some Westerners and Western regimes have committed such atrocities.
    "The transatlantic slave trade conducted by some Westerners between Africa and the New World was a horror. ... Regarding European imperialism, the cruelty toward indigenous peoples is best illustrated by ... King Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo ... [who] hired an army of mercenaries to enslave the native population, demanded that the enslaved meet high quotas for rubber production and ivory harvesting, had his mercenaries chop off the hands of those who fell short, and had them kill recalcitrant natives and burn their villages. ...
    "All these injustices occurred, and objectivity requires acknowledgment of this fact. But we should identify the full truth—which raises several questions about the anti-Western narrative. ...
    "The claim that European and American powers attempted genocide in the New World is worse than either a severe exaggeration or a gross distortion of facts: It is an outright lie. ... To the extent that slavery has been abolished, the credit lies with the abolitionism developed in the West, ending slavery in its own territories and then applying pressure on non-Western nations to shut down the evil practice. ...
    "Even ... a brief survey of history ... is more than enough to raise the question: Why single out white Westerners for the most virulent moral abuse? But we still have not mentioned the major truth overlooked by ... fallacious arguments against the West. .. We refer, of course, to the enormous life-giving achievements of Western civilisation—life-giving for human beings all over the world. ... I’ll merely provide a few examples of these achievements.

• Growing sufficient food is and has long been a terrible problem throughout the non-industrialised world. .... The Green Revolution helped people grow vastly increased supplies of food ... saving upwards of one billion lives ...
• Disease prevention and cure is another critical field for human life in which Western researchers have excelled. [Antoine Lavoisier's pioneering chemistry; Maurice Hillman's and Salk & Sabin's vaccines; Louis Pasteur's germ theory of disease; Joseph Lister's call for antiseptic surgery; Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin ... ] How many human lives around the world did these giants of medicine save? An incalculable number. 
• And Aristotle... the first great biologist of whom we know. His pathbreaking work in the life sciences laid the foundation for subsequent medical advances. Above all, Aristotle married his revolutionary work in logic to his commitment to painstaking empirical research, emphasising that knowledge is gained by logical, noncontradictory thinking about observed facts. He, more than anyone, taught humanity how to think, making progress possible in every field of cognition.
• And no discussion of Western science, no matter how brief, could omit mention of several of the greatest minds of history—Galileo, Newton, and Darwin ...
• In literature, from Homer and Sappho through Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Hugo, Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Jane Austen, and the Bronte sisters to Ayn Rand in the 20th century ... In music, the West has produced such giants as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Verdi, Dvořák, and Puccini. Michelangelo was a towering sculptor, Rembrandt and Vermeer superlative painters, and Leonardo an all-round genius. Film ... has seen such brilliant directors ... as Fritz Lang, Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, Cecil B. DeMille, John Ford, Billy Wilder, David Lean, Steven Spielberg, and Clint Eastwood, as well as a host of talented actors and actresses.

"Even a brief recounting of Western genius must cite John Locke and the birth of the moral principle of individual rights in Great Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries, leading to ... an Industrial Revolution, and stupendous wealth creation and prosperity across vast swathes of the globe ... Starting in Britain, the principle of individual rights led, for the first time in history, to an abolitionist movement that succeeded, to a significant degree, in wiping out the age-old, worldwide scourge of human slavery. Slavery was ubiquitous. Abolitionism was Western.
    "Western civilisation is and often has been profoundly supportive of human life, not because its progenitors have largely been white but because of its fundamental, driving force: reason and all its fruits—freedom, philosophy, science, technology, business, the arts, and other such life-serving values. Skin colour is irrelevant to moral judgment, but reason, individual rights, political-economic liberty, technology and industrialisation—these are vitally important. Western nations export many intellectual and material values to non-Western countries. But its greatest export is a culture of reason and a politics of individual rights; for, to the extent they are adopted, these facilitate immensely life-giving advances in every field of rational endeavour, as they have done in the Asian Tigers.
    "No culture in history contributed more to human well-being than Western civilisation, nor even as much.
    "Why then, do critics single it out for special moral abuse?"

~ Andrew Bernstein, from his article 'The Case for Western Civilisation' [emphases in the original]

NZ's govt health 'system': "delivering equally awful health-care to everyone"

"Enough is enough. Former PMs Helen Clark and Jacinda Ardern should come clean about how they were the Chief Architects of the omni-shambles that has become our health system. ... for the folks who suffer from long waiting lists and declining health-care quality, some of whom didn't make it. 

    "The person who wrote the report [that is] the inspiration behind the disaster that is Health NZ was Heather Simpson, Clark's Chief of Staff for 9 years ... reincarnated by Labour to advise Ardern and Hipkins on health-care. ... The report was the inspiration behind the [disastrous] centralisation of NZ's health system. ...
    "I read the report. No intellectual basis is built for its suggested re-design of health-care delivery. No wonder our system is failing. 

    "It keeps repeating the word 'equity,' seemingly in the hope that by writing that word on paper is enough to deliver it in practice. The report bizarrely repeats 'equity' 219 times (!?) By contrast, the word 'competition,' which is a requirement to ensure quality and efficiency in nearly every economic system, is not mentioned one time. The report thereby seeks to deliver equally awful health-care to everyone."

    "... [The report's] half-baked idea is that the monolithic super-structure it invents ... would create 'economies of scale.' It uses the jargon, 'scaling up.' Health NZ has succeeded only at being a large scale disaster."

~ Robert MacCulloch, from his post 'Former Labour PM's Clark and Ardern wrecked NZ's Health System: they should be held accountable for the lives that have been lost'

 

"The National Party's Monty Python health (non) reform is a comedy. In order to cut layers of management, new layers are being introduced."

"The National Party's Monty Python health (non) reform is a comedy. In order to cut layers of management, new layers are being introduced. ...
    "First, old man Levy ... has been brought back to be the super-duper CEO boss of existing Health NZ CEO boss ... Four new 'Deputy CEOs' have just been appointed below [that] to manage each of four regions NZ has been divvied into. ... The funniest part of National's Health Minister Reti's 'plan' to get health back on track is that [not one] is a doctor. ...
    "What's most amusing is how Minister Reti is trying to portray these moves as a profound reform in which more power is being returned to regions. Bollocks. Both National & Labour supported abolishing the 20 District Health Boards that existed in 2020 to 'centralise' health-care. The only difference is National argues the system should not be quite as centralised as Labour wants. Big Deal.
    "The thrust of the reforms both parties are pushing is to keep our existing single public payer-single public provider system intact (bar a limited role for private provision). Whether one decides to have it administered by 20, 4 or one Board wont change service provision quality. ...
    "Luxon and Reti better get their head around the idea of centralised payment yet decentralised (private) provision fast, or our system will fully implode. The current reforms, based around calling everyone a super CEO, a CEO or a Deputy CEO, titles which are dishonest in the public sector since its a private sector title, will go nowhere."

~ Robert MacCulloch from his post 'More Layers of Management Kick in under National as the Frontline of NZ's Health System is wiped out - Not one Doctor is Appointed to Lead a Region'

"On present form, Luxon is looking like a watered down version of John Key, and Willis a watered down version of Bill English."

"The Prime Minister was elected on the basis that his previous career as CEO meant he had a much greater business acumen than Labour's leaders. ... However, yesterday it was revealed .... that the builder of the now cancelled new ferries ... has put in a claim stemming from the terminated $551 million contract ... [and] KiwRail don't know what will be the size of the claim that the NZ taxpayer will ultimately end up paying. ... [I]t's not up to Kiwi Rail's lawyers to decide what is "fair" - it depends on what HMD's lawyers also believe what is fair - and should the two not agree, it ultimately must be decided in court. Furthermore, the government cannot tell anyone what will be the cost of smaller, scaled-down ferries.
    "The crux of the matter is ... the question ... how could PM Luxon & Finance Minister Willis pull out of a billion dollar deal with no idea of the legal consequences?
    "With no idea of the costs of the claims that will arise?
    "With no idea of the price of a replacement deal?
    "PM Luxon talks a big game but has he ever done a three-billion dollar deal before? No. Has he ever pulled out of a billion dollar deal before? No. Elon Musk tried pulling out of a multi-billion dollar deal to buy Twitter. It was a nightmare - so costly that he ended up going ahead with it.
    "If Luxon and Willis don't smarten up and prove they know how to do deals ... show they know [for example] how to do a quality-enhancing health-care reform (rather than pretending abolishing the Māori Health Authority is a reform plan) then we will know in quick order that both are not the real deal.
    "On present form, Luxon is looking like a watered down version of John Key, and Willis a watered down version of Bill English. Labour were so bad that anything is an improvement. But these two are so far looking like not much of one."

~ Robert MacCulloch from his post 'Who, with an ounce of business sense, pulls out of a deal with no idea of what legal claims will arise, and with no idea of the price of a replacement deal? PM Luxon and Finance Minister Willis.'

"Increased opposition to vaccines is a partial measure of how high a percentage this is."

"I’m going to have to write something in the near future about the big paradox of the pandemic years, which is that we produced a vaccine in record time that saved many millions of lives—the biggest demonstration in decades of the value of vaccines. Yet the result is that anti-vaccine sentiment has increased.
    "I think it’s a combination of three things. First, we are more culturally primed for anti-technology sentiment than we were when the polio vaccine was introduced in the 1950s. Second, thanks to vaccines, we are more culturally removed from the point at which infectious disease was a leading cause of death and a threat that continually loomed over human life, so we no longer appreciate what vaccines have saved us from. Third, a long period between major pandemics meant that nobody had to think about vaccines. They accepted them as a matter of course. But the pandemic suddenly required people to form an opinion about a new vaccine, and when people are required to think, a certain percentage of them will quite frankly be bad at it. Increased opposition to vaccines is a partial measure of how high a percentage this is.
    "At any rate, misplaced skepticism about vaccines has centred especially around the new technology of mRNA vaccines. But again, the paradox is that this targets a new technology that works. Specifically, mRNA vaccines offer tremendous speed and flexibility in creating new vaccines that shows enormous promise for treating things that could never be treated before.
    "In this case, it’s a vaccine for brain cancer...."

~ Robert Tracinski, from his post 'A Roundup of Good News: The Paradox of mRNA'

A question for libertarians in plague times

Here’s a simple hypothetical question I’ve yet to see libertarians address properly, and now's as good a time as any to ask it: What is the role of government in a time of actual plague?

Now, if you’re an anarchist, you can leave the chat now, since you don’t think there’s a role for government at all. That things will all just magically work out for the best when there’s a market for force. (Good luck to you on that one.)

No, I'm talking here to principled libertarians who aren’t primarily anti-government but pro-liberty. So I’m asking this of principled pro-liberty libertarians who support the idea that the proper role of government is the protection of citizens’ individual rights, that governments should be tied up constitutionally, and that such governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed. Let’s call it one such administration Government X. And I'm asking: What should our Government X do in a time of actual plague? 

Argue here if you like that a carrier of an infectious disease can in no way violate anyone else’s individual rights, in which case you’re either making a damn good argument for that position (and could apply it for example to HIV/AIDs as well), or you’re probably also leaving the chat at this point to join the anarchists.

But (to concretise the question for you), imagine Government X were in power when a plague slowly took over the country. To keep it somewhat concrete, imagine if you like that we’re in Elizabethan times, in London, when plagues would regularly ravage the place, and the Master of the Rolls would shut down the London theatres so the plague wouldn’t spread that way. Now you can say, as I would, that there shouldn't be a Master of Rolls. And you can argue, as historians have done, that his decision helped spread the plague even more widely because the theatre companies went on tour, taking plague rats with them. But do you say that our Elizabethan Government X wouldn’t at least have a conversation about theatre attendance, and make some decision about it? Perhaps, at least, to devise some objective rules by which if they're followed theatres and other places may stay open (remembering that the Elizabethans didn’t even know rats’ fleas were plague’s cause, and that those wanting to attend the theatres might themselves be eager to see evidence of some kind of protection; and that Elizabethan theatre insurance probably didn't cover damages from killing your audience.)

Let’s make the decision even more difficult for you. Imagine that it’s a serious plague; that it's often (but not always) fatal within a certain period of time; and that a patient infected with our plague generally doesn’t even know they have it for several days, during which time they are already terribly infectious to others. So, it’s a new plague about which even those whose advice you value know little yet (that’s ‘cos it’s new, and Elizabethan science advice wasn't always that great — they still recommended leeches, if you recall). But those two deadly observations about this new plague seem to be the emerging facts. 

This puts an even more complex complexion on things, doesn't it. If this were so, don’t you think our whole population would would be having a chat about it, not least our Elizabethan Government X? About how to deal with apparently uninfected folk infecting uninfected others, without infringing the rights of either? (And if you’re saying at this point that we should all be left "free" to be infected, then you’re probably about ready to leave the chat and buy a straitjacket.) 

It’s no good just saying about our Elizabethan Government X that “they have no role,” since clearly they do: if I have an infection that can prove fatal to you, and I insist on still visiting the theatres, there’s as much a role for government as there would be if I went to one wearing a suicide vest. (And you need to leave more than just the chat if you think there isn’t.) And Government X would have as much of a legitimate interest in this plague being spread from theatres as in a bareback brothel boasting a harem with full-blown HIV/AIDs. 

Now, you can insist (as I expect on past evidence many libertarians might) that “this isn’t really a plague” — except here we’ve already stipulated that it is. Or that our Elizabethan experts are wrong (which we’ve already agreed they might be). Or that the government is full of power-lusters who are just using the plague to advance their power — as many probably would, as they do in times of war as well, but this doesn’t devalue the very threat of this special plague we’ve imagined, and ignores that we’ve already agreed that we’re talking here of a principled Government X.

So, I ask you again: what is the proper role in such times of our principled Government X?

You tell me. 

Here's Monty Python:

"The differences between how the two pandemics — HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 — were managed are probably quite instructive"

"Still, Dr Turville is acutely aware of the vitriol frequently directed at people who promote COVID safety.... This both puzzles and amuses him. ...
    "Then again, the differences between how the two pandemics — HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 — were managed ... are probably quite instructive, says Dr Turville. With HIV, experts and health ministers collectively built a strong public health strategy that they strove to protect from politics. 'When we look at COVID, it was political from the start and continues to be,' he says. We also now lack a 'mid to long-term plan to navigate us through' this next phase of COVID-19: 'Some argue that we are no longer in the emergency phase and need to gear down or simply stop,' he says. 'But should we stop, and if not, what do we gear down to as a longer-term plan?'..
    "'I think there's a lot of patting on the back at the moment — job well done. And that's nice, but I think it's somewhat job well done, there goes the rug,' he says. 'I think it's the apathy that's the concern. And I think it's coming top-down ... I just don't understand why, like we had with HIV, there can't be a mid-term strategy'."

~ from the article 'The COVID-safe strategies Australian scientists are using to protect themselves from the virus'

"New Zealand has administered 12 million doses, which would mean 12,000 vaccine-induced deaths. I see no room for that kind of mortality here."

"As everybody in this corner of the internet knows, a New Zealand Te Whatu Ora employee named Barry Young leaked four million vaccination records from New Zealand’s “pay per dose” vaccine programme to Steve Kirsch on 8 November. ...
    "A lively Twitter  debate has emerged about the significance of the data and their proper interpretation. 

* * * * 

"Further drama has visited the real world. Young, the leaker, was arrested on Sunday for “dishonestly accessing Te Whatu Ora databases.”...  This reaction cannot, in itself, be used to argue that there must be evidence of mass vaccine mortality in this dataset.... 

"I was fairly certain from the beginning that there would be nothing all that dramatic in these records, because the possibilities are bounded firmly by all-cause New Zealand mortality statistics. 

"Consider all-cause mortality in New Zealand for the past five years:

2018: 33,225 deaths
2019: 34,260 deaths
2020: 32,613 deaths
2021: 34,932 deaths
2022: 38,574 deaths

"2023 is not over yet, but 37,569 deaths have been counted there through the end of September. This is somewhat lower than the 38,052 deaths recorded by September 2022, so 2023 is on track to be a slightly better year.
    "New Zealand effectively shut itself off from the world in 2020 in an effort to stop Covid, and their measures inevitably stopped a lot of other viruses too. At great cost, they seem to have saved about 2,000 lives in the short term, accounting for the anomalously low death numbers in 2020. 

    "The elevated death numbers for 2022 – the year the pandemic reached New Zealand – are officially the fault of Covid, but some of them must simply represent a compensatory rise from the low point of 2020, because viruses tend to kill the very old and the very sick, and these people have to die sometime. 

    "In 2022 and 2023, I can see room for an absolute maximum of 8,000 excess deaths. Probably 2,000 of these are sick and frail people who would’ve died in 2020 had it been a normal year, and so we’re left with at most 6,000 deaths to divide between the arrival of Covid, the return of other viruses and the vaccines. This is remarkably close to the official Covid New Zealand death count, which is currently at 5,143.
    "It’s simple, then: How much room you think there is for direct vaccine mortality will depend on how much you dispute these official Covid death numbers. I propose that any more than 2,000 vaccine deaths is just not very plausible. Certainly, there is no way to make Kirsch’s estimated vaccine mortality rate of one death per 1,000 vaccinations work with these numbers. New Zealand has administered 12 million doses, which would mean 12,000 vaccine-induced deaths. I see no room for that kind of mortality here...."

~ Eugyppius, from his post 'The New Zealand Vaccination Records Leak: A New Analysis by William Briggs and Some Lesser Thoughts of My Own'