Judging by the reaction of the paid and bought propaganda arm of the State (also known as the legacy mainstream media) ‘Super Saturday’, 16 October 2021, was a roaring success. The amount of coverage given to it online by the NZ Herald and Stuff amounted to column miles, not inches.
On the face of it, the numbers look impressive. According to the Ministry of Health (now known as the ‘Ministry of Jabs’, because that’s all they seem to be doing nowadays), a record 129,995 doses were administered today, including 39,024 first doses. The previous record for a single day was on 26 August when 90,757 doses were given.
But like anything, there’s a context that needs to be considered before jumping to any quick conclusions.
First, the timing of the event was cynical. This week mandatory vaccinations for health and education workers was announced. This affects a huge portion of the population, from front-line workers, full-time and part-time staff, and even contractors who are not employed in those sectors, but carry out contract work in schools and hospitals. Hundreds of thousands of kiwi workers are now required to get the jab, or have no job. Other requirements, such as weekly testing, needed for contractors and employees to even enter onto relevant sites start as early as next week. Most of these people would chose not to have the vaccine if they could, and the rest were hesitant about it.
But these people face losing their jobs and income if they don’t. That’s not super. That’s compulsion. They have no choice but to get it.
I would say a large majority of people turning up for the jab this ‘Super Saturday’ would chose not to be there, if they had a free choice.
How can anything which requires the coercion and compulsion of another to achieve its aim be considered a success?
Another section of those that took the jab on ‘Super Saturday’ would have been those who were going to get it anyway, but took advantage of the day off, great weather, and free bribes to get it done today. It must be remembered we are still under Level 3 restrictions for most of the population. One of the only reasons you can go outside is to get a vaccination. So why not combine the desperation to get some sun with a permitted activity? It will be interesting to see what the daily numbers are in the following days to see if this hypothesis can be confirmed.
By 3pm the number of 100,000 had been ‘smashed’, and Jacinda Ardern, who cut a comical figure at times wearing a Polynesian headress and face mask (why does someone ‘protected’ by the vax have to wear a face mask anyway?), urged kiwis to get it past 150,000 by the finish time of 8pm. As it turned out the final figure was well short of that, by 21,000. ‘Super Saturday’, it seemed, had ended on a downer.
And let’s look at the amount of coverage the event has had. Millions upon millions of dollars of taxpayer money, funnelled into the mainstream la-la land, providing wall-to-wall coverage of the ‘get vaxed’ message on all forms of media. Turn on the radio, its about the vax. Change the station, still the vax. Online the coverage is ubiquitous, hogging the main headlines for hour after hour, with story after story about getting the vax and what’s going to happen to you if you don’t. There were A-list kiwi celebrities from Lorde to Neil Finn urging us from their privileged mortgage-free mansions to get the needle. I certainly hope our home-grown celebrities don’t start preaching to us plebs about how to live our lives, like they do in Hollywood. With all this money, power, coverage, resources, compulsion, coercion, the threats of loss of income and livelihood, you would think a million kiwis would have been mobilised to visit their local jab centre.
Far from it.
