Countries that have dropped all mandates, mask use & VPass (or are just about to):

1. Norway ??
2. Scotland ???????
3. Uk ??
4. Ireland ??
5. Spain ??
6. Mexico ??
7. Czech
8. Slovakia ??
9. Germany ??
10. Japan ??
11. Denmark ??
12. Turkey ??
13. Brazil ??
14. Singapore ??
15. El Salvador ??
16. France ??
17. Portugal ??
18. Greece ??

Scotland ???????
https://www.independent.ie/news/all-of-scotlands-omicron-restrictions-to-end-on-monday-says-nicola-sturgeon-41252933.html

Uk ??

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/uk-covid-restrictions-cases-boris-johnson-ends-rules-england/#app

Ireland ??

https://www.irishcentral.com/news/ireland-lift-covid-restrictions

Denmark ??

https://www.politico.eu/article/denmark-becomes-first-eu-country-to-scrap-all-covid-19-restrictions/

Norway ??

https://insiderpaper.com/norway-scraps-most-covid-restrictions-despite-omicron-surge/

independent

All of Scotland’s Omicron restrictions to end on Monday, says Nicola Sturgeon

Nicola Sturgeon has announced all of Scotland’s coronavirus restrictions introduced in response to the Omicron wave will be brought to an end next Monday.

For those not already aware, the link to the group chat:

https://t.me/joinchat/ScPjtBA_Uf36Kn6b

playing sport together outside the school yard.
- The absurd rules that prohibit two young unvaccinated brothers, living in the same household, from sailing together in a sailing competition because they would be within two metres of each other while sailing their boat.
- The rules that require one to put on a mask to walk to and from the bathroom inside a restaurant when masks have already been removed while eating and drinking.
- The contradictory rules that allow unvaccinated people to take a domestic flight (with a negative Covid test) but prohibit a young unvaccinated kid from competing in their sport (outside school).
- The fact that our kids are forced to wear masks at school (even when it's well known that the surgical masks most of them are wearing are highly ineffective).

Finally and perhaps most important, I'm against the fact that some of our mainstream media have received payment from the New Zealand government conditional on them promoting government policy, propaganda and spin.

So yes, I'll be joining the protest in Wellington.

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=502949084521812&id=100044201750934

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From the legendary Sir Russell Coutts:

I'm heading to Wellington next week to join the protest. It's the first time I've ever felt compelled to join a protest.

I'm not anti-vaccine (I'm vaccinated) but I'm definitely against forced vaccinations.

I'm also strongly opposed to the ever increasing erosion of our human rights and the growing limitations on our freedom of choice. I believe in having the freedom to be able to question so-called "expert" opinion.

I'm against discrimination and the "them and us" society that is being promoted by our current political leaders.

I'm against creating different rights, laws and privileges based on Race.

I'm also against the irrational Covid rules that are currently being mandated in New Zealand, a few examples being:
- The 10 day quarantine that still remains for international travel.
- The absurd rules where our kids (vaccinated and unvaccinated) can sit in the same classroom and play sport together inside the school yard, yet are prohibited from

So many we know are making plans to head to Wellington to support the camp out at Parliament - can you make it there?

Make it a priority, make history, and make a massive difference!

This is what all the other protests, events, box drops, social media posts, have been leading up to, we just didn't know it at the time.

Get there!

71 per cent opposed the lifting of restrictions last summer. Only in December 2021 did the mood start to turn, with majorities against the closure of shops, schools and pubs.

Those earlier figures already feel incredible, don’t they? Broadcasters and Labour MPs who spent two years screaming for tighter restrictions are now, without a blush, talking about the misery they caused. But, trust me, opposing the first lockdown was a bloody lonely business. Few commentators came out against the restrictions in March 2020, among them: Toby Young, Fraser Nelson, Jonathan Sumption, Matthew Parris, Freddie Sayers, Janet Daley, Julia Hartley-Brewer, James Delingpole, Peter Hitchens, Ross Clark and, soon afterwards, Allison Pearson.

Back in that sun-drenched, terrified, illiberal spring, no dissent was permitted. Even to point out that an alternative approach was possible - and visible in Sweden - was to court vilification. When Toby Young wrote that we habitually did put a value on human life via the recognised formula for calculating quality-adjusted life-years, that we used it whenever medical interventions were proposed, and that we should apply the same test to lockdowns, he became a national hate figure, howled down as some sort of eugenicist.

The odium was overwhelmingly one-way. Lockdown sceptics did not respond by accusing their opponents of aiming to destroy children’s education, or of being indifferent to mental illness, or of wanting others to die of cancer. Nor did they accuse them of being “anti-science”.

Yet it soon became clear that the science on which the lockdowns were predicated was incorrect. Supporters of the closures had predicted a catastrophe in Sweden. By imposing only mild restrictions, the authorities had, according to most international observers, condemned their people to mass fatalities.

In fact, cases peaked and declined in Sweden more or less in line with everywhere else. In other words, the original justification for the lockdowns had been falsified as early as April 2020. But by then people were invested in their sense of sacrifice. The closures were maintained, but the justification kept having to be amended. “Flatten the curve” became “wait for a vaccine”. When the vaccine arrived, it became “keep the pressure off the NHS”, then “stop new variants”.

As more real-world data came in, it became clear that the length and severity of a lockdown made remarkably little difference to infection, hospitalisation or death rates. Other factors mattered more: latitude, population density, obesity, vaccination rates and, most of all, average age. But this did not stop the modellers from churning out their incorrect predictions – always incorrect in the same direction.

“Were we fools then,” asked William Hazlitt in his essay on William Godwin, “or are we dishonest now?”

(Excerpt from
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/02/05/lonely-opposing-first-lockdown-day-will-come-no-one-remembers/)

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/02/02/trusting-people-do-right-thing-saved-lives-covid-lockdowns/

[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/12/25/covid-lockdowns-plunged-nearly-million-people-poverty-warns/

The Telegraph

It was lonely opposing the first lockdown, but the day will come when no one remembers backing it

Admitting that the cancelled weddings and ruined businesses were for nothing, is not easy. Still, the evidence keeps piling up.

It was lonely opposing the first lockdown, but the day will come when no one remembers backing it.

Did you oppose the Iraq war? Good for you. It seems bizarre, 19 years on, that anyone ever thought it a good idea to spend a trillion pounds, kill hundreds of thousands of civilians and turn millions more into refugees, only to end up destroying Western prestige and creating more extremists in the region than before.

I have to ask though – forgive my being so blunt – whether you are quite sure that you were against it at the time. You see, according to YouGov, 66 per cent of us backed the invasion when it was launched. Then the disasters began – the civilian casualties, the Abu Ghraib abuses, the rise of Islamic State – and people started to edit their memories. Asked the same question by the same pollster in 2015, only 37 per cent admitted to having backed military action in 2003.

Something similar, I have no doubt, will happen over the lockdowns. As the dreadful health and economic costs bite, few will recall having supported the closures. Just as most Frenchmen over a certain age remember backing the Resistance, so most Brits will remember being lockdown sceptics. Psychologists call it “hindsight bias”.

We are not there yet. Many cling, with a tinge of desperation, to the notion that their sacrifices were worthwhile. Admitting that the cancelled weddings, the ruined businesses, the lost education, the NHS waiting lists and the national debt were incurred in error, that we narrowed our children’s lives for nothing, is not easy.

Still, the evidence keeps piling up. A meta-study of 24 surveys, reported in Wednesday’s Telegraph, found that imposing a compulsory lockdown, as opposed to trusting people to use their common sense, reduced the mortality rate by just 0.2 per cent. [1] Think about that. Around 52,000 lives were lost in Britain in the first wave. If these figures are correct – and the researchers from Johns Hopkins and Lund universities have done a thorough job with a huge dataset – then the most extreme curtailment of freedom in modern times saved perhaps 100 lives.

Those people were just as much the centre of their universes as you are of yours. But more lives will be lost through undetected tumours and other undiagnosed conditions. Indeed, as the researchers note, the lockdown killed people, not just through secondary causes, but with Covid, because it pushed them indoors where transmission was more likely.

Judged even by the metric of mortality, the lockdowns failed. But how to measure the other privations and penalties – the taped-off playgrounds, the bad haircuts, the dye poured into lakes to keep people away, the insolent tone which the police took with honest citizens, the loneliness of the elderly, the bankruptcies, the ruined university experiences, the money-printing, the mental health problems hatching in silence?

The thought that these things were needless is too painful to contemplate. The more we suffered, the more we tell ourselves that it must have been worthwhile. [2] Think, for example, of how quickly the cost-benefit analysis turned negative for the combatant nations in the First World War. Most belligerents hoped for swift and relatively painless victories. They instead found themselves paying a price that, had they been able to foresee it, would have made their participation unthinkable.

Yet, precisely for that reason, they felt they had to keep going. Settling for anything less than victory would mean betraying the sacrifice of the fallen. It would mean that their sons had died for nothing. And so, in history’s grisliest example of the sunk costs fallacy, they carried on hurling their young men against the machine guns.

It was hard to reappraise the First World War while survivors wanted to find meaning in their loss. Only in the 1960s did the view that the conflict was futile become dominant. How long until the lockdowns are similarly reappraised? No fewer than 93 per cent of Britons backed the first lockdown, and 85 per cent the second.

How refreshing. ?

"I have to confess I laughed when a press release arrived in my inbox last week: “Chief Ombudsman applauds No 1 global ranking in Transparency International index.”

I laughed because I have been shocked since returning to New Zealand at the end of 2020, after two decades reporting overseas, at just how obstructive and deliberately untransparent our public service has become.

But open government appears to be on the wane. This is partly because of the growth in the “communications industrial complex”, where vast battalions of people now work to deflect and avoid, or answer in the most oblique manner possible. We journalists are vastly outnumbered by spin doctors.

But it’s an artfully crafted mirage, as my colleague Andrea Vance wrote last year. “At every level, the Government manipulates the flow of information,” she wrote."

https://i.stuff.co.nz/opinion/127682814/when-did-our-public-service-get-so-arrogant

Stay informed: www.voicesforfreedom.co.nz/stay-informed ?