New Zealand's prime minister only fields questions from "accredited" reporters
But what is in the data?
In case you missed it, a video of New Zealand’s prime minister cutting short a press conference went viral last week. It’s a somewhat bizarre piece of footage, which you can view here.
In the clip, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern can be seen telling a gaggle of reporters that she is “doing everything” to boost vaccination rates when she is interrupted by a man in a suit (not seen from this angle) who, citing Israeli data, questions the efficacy of the vaccine.
Ardern tells the man that she is going to answer the questions of the “accredited media” and then warns him that she will shut down the press conference if he does not “cease.”
When the man interjects again the prime minister, who recently expanded the country’s vaccine mandate to cover 40% of workers, abruptly ends the presser with the following remark:
Sorry to our accredited members of the gallery here, we might move to an inside venue. Unfortunately, we have somebody who is disrupting your press conference today.
You can see how the incident was covered by an “accredited” local media source here.
The man who interrupted the PM, the anchor informs her viewers, was “a heckler who claimed to be from a far-right media group linked to former Trump advisor Steve Bannon.”
Coincidentally, shortly after the Ardern video hit the web, a well-known Substack writer published an examination of Israeli/Palestinian data with the aim of assessing the effectiveness of Covid vaccines. It’s not a long read, so I recommend going through the analysis and drawing your own conclusions, but here’s the author’s takeaway:
israel began vaccinating in december 2020. they hit 60% on march 29 2021. on that date palestine still had zero vaccination.
the deaths in israel rapidly flattened. palestine kept rising. people called this a big victory for vaccines. but then a month later, palestine flattened too and that story fell apart. it was seasonal/reporting lag.
then, on aug 7th, israel surged again. palestine followed a few weeks later. they really have not looked different. 66% vaxx and 12% performed about the same in 2 countries that had been performing about the same all along.
Here is Google’s graph of Covid-19 cases in Israel over the past few months: