No, complicit unions, the Covid response regime lives on.

It is sadly amusing how often "news reports" these days so consistently, obliviously, carry the seeds of their own rebuttal.

The Covid response regime has delivered us years of such content, consumed uncritically by most, or shrugged off with disinterest at best. Because the regime taught us all that dissent from the precepts of their response programme was the fast track to vilification and humiliation - and all too easily given the mercilessly neoliberal state of our capitalist economy - a crushing of personal livelihoods, professional reputations and careers.

And the Covid response regime is is still in order. The propagandising, passports, mandates and mask orders are gone. But the ideas and thinking behind those decision remain firmly in place. Not Recanted, retracted, not even examined. Not from a calmer moral more evenly democratic perspective, and not for their effects. The consequences have not been researched or measured. There is no media interest, certainly not in how many were coerced into taking the biotech injection; how many cried in the shower, before or after as their whole being screamed this is wrong - as it was, in myriad ways (to be laid out in a later dedicated post). Even with NZ First's revision of the official inquiry, the base idea is "we did everything well, but can do it better. Because the next pandemic will come."

All of which is a light brush of salience on what remains a momentous topic for our society and future. And that is why it was amusing to read the typical anti-thought hit piece about the new "anti-mandate" teachers, doctors and nurses unions come out. 

All of these incumbent unions, we must remember, are supposed to fight for their members employment rights; and we must remember all immediately stepped aside hands off when their members were ordered to get jabbed or leave. They were not special in this, every "responsible" organisation or official or public figure who wanted to keep their job did the same. A meek comment from the Human Rights Commissioner aside, the uniformity of  this surrender to authority was chilling to behold. For teachers, they were ordered to leave 4 weeks into their last term with their class - no end of year celebrations, no camps, only ritual humiliation for thinking differently about a complex, uncertain scenario of knowns and unknowns that was walled away behind concrete authoritarian watchwords. Mandatory. Effective. Perfectly safe.  

They grudgingly retired the "perfectly" later.

But back to the article, behold the "thinking" evident in these incumbent unions:

[Chris] Abercrombie, the PPTA president, said he understood TPANZ was a group “mostly motivated by their opposition to the Covid vaccine mandates… it does feel like the horse has bolted a little bit [on that issue]... I’m not sure what problem they are trying to solve?”

And then

Paul Goulter (The New Zealand Nurses Organisation)said “the freedom argument doesn’t apply to vaccines... when the choice not to be vaccinated has serious potential repercussions for the wellbeing of others.”

This is exactly the problem teachers, nurses and doctors face, Mr Abercrombie. The thinking has not changed. Goulter's statement is that of a fanatic, not a thinker. And as addressed when the inquiry was formed, Head of NZ Royal Commission of Inquiry Professor Tony Blakely repeats in his February 8 email panui: 

"The unfortunate reality is that there will be another pandemic, and we need to take this opportunity to learn the lessons, both from our own experiences and from those overseas, so that we’re as prepared as possible."

Let's just cut out the discussion of a pandemic as a biological or socially constructed phenomenon, for now, and accept that Professor Blakely is both expert enough in the scientific terms of a pandemic  and socially and professionally connected enough to trust his assertion that yes - another pandemic is coming.  We have learned a "pandemic" may be a great biological threat or small - so more importantly for humanity and society, the more certain risk is that another pandemic response regime is coming. And a good response does not mean "doing everything we did last time, but better". The only way to do better next time is to stop externalising inconvenient consequences from the regime actions and to properly account for the harm and suffering and wrongdoing the Covid response caused. 

Given so many of the local architects of the covid response derangement retain some sort of authority, it's reasonable to think change will be slow in coming. Hence the need for unions interested in protecting their members rights to earn and retain their reputation and dignity in a decaying capitalist economy without having to submit to whatever dubious biotech product a fearful government signs up to, carte blanche, just because it succeeded in crawling through the USA's corrupt and conflicted regulatory environment.

Now we have the Royal Commission of Inquiry; but of course the commission is made up of the same sort of compromised or true believer folk who enabled the regime. that's not conspiracy, it's groupthink: the group is dominated by people who all think the same way. Nonetheless, the public submissions are open, and so everyone dissenting or harmed by the Covid Response regime has their chance for their voice to go on record. At the least. 

Maybe all those doctors and teachers and nurses and other workers who lost their jobs and reputations will get to find out what qualified 11,000 health workers to get 12A exemptions, when people with actual violent reactions to their first shot could not?

I will make my own submission, as there are many questions I'd like to see asked and reflected on. Fundamental questions of the place of doubt and dissent in science; the threshold of interventionism and the obligation to do no harm; the acknowledgment that technology is not science and is not value neutral; the hubris of certainty in your own values and worldview, and the risks of authority to use a socially constructed emergency to dominate and control others. And when authority does coerce and control, the need for that authority to take full responsibility of all consequences: that means going looking and studying the harm done to every one they coerced, not denying and brushing it under the carpet.
Without this absolute responsibility,  unless you believe a person has no more value than being one of a million cattle, the techno-fascism inherent in Goulter's "all must swallow" approach must be opposed.

More on all that as my submission is composed.