In the first episode of Survivors in 1975,’The Fourth Horseman’, we see the character Jenny Richards for the first time, as she tries to comfort her feverish flatmate, Pat. It just so happens that Pat is having an affair with a doctor, Andrew, so Jenny goes off to the hospital to get his help. Upon arrival she comes across a line of people get a Flu jab. However, when she finds Andrew he states that the hospital is overwhelmed, and the Flu jabs are effectively useless, “we may as well be squirting water into them for all the good it will do.” Andrew tells Jenny that are just keeping up the fiction of effective action being taken, on the Home Secretary’s instructions, to try and prevent a panic taking hold as deaths rise.

One could compare this with the pressure being put on people to get a so-called booster jab in New Zealand, even though the Pfizer drug is obviously outdated for the Omicron variant. In the old days, before the current pandemic, vaccines were supposed to provide immunity, which meant the vaccinated would not contract the virus. This was what being ‘fully vaccinated’ supposedly meant, but now they use the vague term ‘protection’, which means that even though the vaccinated are not immune, they are ‘protected’. So apparently the Pfizer drug cannot prevent contraction, but then, some time later, it protects the patient from a serious bout, which is about 90% of the cases, and the ‘protection’ only lasts a few weeks. Hence it now seems there has to be a ‘booster’ injection for each new Covid variant.

The tactics to pressure the public into getting yet another Pfizer jab are now familiar. Send out for the shock troops of the pandemic response, the academic modellers, as assisted by the existing experts, like Michael Baker, who appears in every single news bulletin in mainstream media in New Zealand. But while the tactics may be familiar, the results are not going to plan, mainly because the government are only maintaining a fiction that even the experts don’t believe. For instance, in late January, the public broadcaster RNZ referred to modelling that an overseas expert had done, but did not have to name, because Baker said the model was ‘sound’. It claimed that there would be 50 000 cases of Omicron on 6 February in New Zealand. The significance of the date is that 6 February is Waitangi Day in New Zealand, a kind of ‘national day’, and the public holiday makes for the last long weekend in summer.

Anyway, the actual outcome for Covid cases was 180, which was slightly lower than the previous day, and the trend which is about 200 cases a day. This is a far cry from 50 000, and is so inaccurate that all the media that followed RNZ with the story now look ridiculous. In a pathetic attempt to try and change the narrative it was claimed that testing had been too low, due to the public holiday, and because there is an apparent reluctance of people to get tested because a positive case means that a whole household has to isolate at home for an extended period. But that is only in the first phase of Omicron, as once the outbreak overwhelms the health system, people have to fend for themselves according to Dr Verall.

But new modelling had to be commissioned from the so-called experts at Auckland University, led by the charlatan Shaun Hendy, who is personally funded by the dictator Ardern’s own departmental budget. So anyway Hendy has come up with the desired result, which predicts that the Omicron outbreak will peak at between 10 000 to 30 000 cases per day; despite the fact that the total number of Covid cases for the whole pandemic was only just over 15 000 cases when he concocted the model. We get the idea though, it has to be a five figure number to scare enough people to get the so-called booster jab, which is apparently safe despite the time required since the second dose being reduced down from 6 to 3 months. And we now know that every jab costs the New Zealand taxpayer $36. No wonder that Pfizer BioNtech are making astronomical profits, since they have such effective academic drug pushers.

Enter the quixotic Dr Michael Baker. He must have been asked by one of the media supplicants why the model constructed by his colleagues in America appeared to be so wildly inaccurate. But no, it was no inaccurate at all, said Baker, it was just that the timing was out. New Zealand had been so good at suppressing the early stages of the Omicron outbreak, but it was still inevitable that cases would soon double every few days. And the peak would still be about 50 000 cases, it would just be reaching that total in March, before becoming endemic in the population, as his friend Plank had already stated. Of course, the actual numbers don’t matter, what underlies their analysis is that the basic model of a pandemic looks that way, even if the numbers are not accurate. Moreover, this model must work even when there is the availability of vaccines, it is only politicians that need them to keep up the fiction.

Baker appeared on the evening news just now, with another deferential female presenter. She said that he would discuss the science behind the mandates, but there isn’t any. Baker just repeated the ‘safety’ trope: the vaccinated have to kept safe from the unvaccinated, who are presumed to always be infectious; but the vaccinated people do not transmit the virus to each other. Omicron has made that view a nonsense. So she asked Baker when the mandates would be removed, as has happened in Denmark. Baker doubled down by saying that the vaccine passports should now be based on 3 injections, and not with only 2. So she tried again, when would the restrictions ever end? Well, the truth is that Baker never wants the pandemic to end, and his 7 day a week media operation to cease: he is addicted to the limelight, and the belief in his own talismanic hold over New Zealanders minds.