BRING OTHERS ALONG FOR THE RIDE
Diana Wichtel on being stranded with Ted Lasso, Succession and viral manifestos
Stranded in Auckland. We chart our moods by the television we’re bingeing. A moment of hope? There’s the desperately good-natured gospel according to Ted Lasso: “There ain’t nothin’ you can’t get through together.” As a metaphor for the nation’s increasingly irritable Covid purgatory, see Succession, in which the rapacious Roy clan circle like vultures, pointlessly plotting to destroy each other. Forget Ted Lasso’s innocent shortbread. This is a family where you can be only 98 per cent sure Dad hasn’t poisoned the doughnuts.
If you have wondered, constantly, who thought it was a good idea to corral billions of people on a rock in an absurd universe where the best we can hope for when it comes to co-existing is a wary truce, Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm is here for you.
Meanwhile, the purgatory is ongoing, the absurdity epic. As mandates hit and vaccine passports loom, we must now be not just amateur epidemiologists but part-time bioethicists. In some ways, the Government’s plan to deal with the reality of Delta is an impressively tooled machine. How to ensure that requiring vaccine rates of 90 per cent doesn’t stigmatise communities with low rates? Calculate it by DHBS. Vaccine mandates and passports offer the carrot — some freedom — and the stick: considerably less freedom, for the unvaccinated, to be in risky spaces.
These plans have seen fractures in the team of five million. From the cracks have emerged some wild takes. What to say about former broadcaster Liz Gunn’s viral video manifesto except that the term “jab rape” is a stretch and it’s unlikely that “Mother Earth” sent an earthquake to get Jacinda.
To those who use yellow stars and Nazi memes to protest Aotearoa’s Covid response: a government trying, with inevitable mistakes, to protect all its citizens from being harmed by a devastating virus is not actually how the Holocaust began.
But, in what seems like a rare misstep from a politician who really does rarely misstep in matters of communication, some messaging around vaccine mandates has been uncomfortable. A Herald journalist questioned the Prime Minister about the implications of certificates. “So — you probably don’t see it like this — it’s two different classes of people.” She saw it like that. “That is what it is,” she replied blithely. “So, yup.”
It’s about driving up vaccines, she said, and about confidence. “People who are vaccinated will want to know they are around other vaccinated people.”
Oh dear. You don’t want to be talking about “classes” of people. Restrictions unvaccinated people face, for their own safety as much as anything, is stick enough. Lord knows we’ve all had liberties taken away already and most people understand why. But this stuff isn’t easy. The Opposition ploughed in, generating such bewildering headlines as, “Collins denounces ‘two-class system’ but won’t rule out vaccine certificates.”
Most places are setting boundaries. “It’s very simple,” said Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. “If you want to continue to work for the public service of Canada, you need to be fully vaccinated.” But you worry about punishing people like the kids here who can be vaccinated but whose parents won’t allow it.
On TVNZ’S Q+A, Otago University bioethicist Angela Ballantyne fretted about the discourse that divides people into those who have made the right decision and the others we need protection from. “That rhetoric really labels some New Zealanders as a threat to other New Zealanders. I think that’s problematic.”
Passports could be justified on public health grounds, she said. But she favours the sort of “sunset clause” Israel built in, a limit on their use. She cited France, where evidence of a test can be used by unvaccinated people.
These things need discussion. There’s always a risk, in “othering” people, of pushing those who can’t or won’t play by the rules further out to the extremes. We’ve got a long way in Aotearoa by pulling together.
As the gospel according to our own public health Ted Lasso, Ashley Bloomfield, insists, the virus is the problem, not the people. However wrong-headed and frustrating some of them are, trying to bring them along for the ride is the best answer.