- Superb news. Finally. The government is starting to be a bit more flexible about safe alternatives to MIQ.
- I like how Australia still thinks big. Here's Stephen Kirchner making the case for a large increase in immigration.
- There's a claim that carbon farming, via forest sequestration, starts being costly after a century. I'm still not convinced. If carbon prices are high enough that people can't cut down trees at that point, they may be high enough to warrant digging a giant hole, sticking the cut trees into the hole, covering it up, sticking a pipe in for methane recovery, and replanting it. Maybe there's some price range where carbon isn't valuable enough to do that, but too costly to allow cutting the pine plantation. But should that be the presumption?
- On the merits of not letting Covid become endemic in New Zealand. It is not the flu. I still wonder what the heck happened to Pfizer's talk of a delta-specific vaccine from back in June(ish). I'd understood mRNA to be plug-and-play. It took them only a couple days to develop the vaccine in the first place, on having Covid sequences to play with. Why isn't there a delta-vax yet?
- Asher Wilson-Goldman on what it will take to get vax out to the last 17 percent. Remember of course that this government is forcing Maori health providers to sue them to get access to the systems needed.
- Remember how we all got excited when the government made Verrall, who'd written the darned report on the inadequacies of contact tracing, the new Deputy Minister in charge of that? Well, nothing's fixed. Contact tracing still isn't up to the job. Why? The government couldn't imagine elimination failing, so just didn't prepare for it.
- Lew Stoddart on the end of elimination. He's more than a little too charitable about the Government's record up to the past couple of weeks; the Government had ignored expert calls for all kinds of measures that would have reduced the likelihood of the current outbreak happening in the first place.
- A month ago, I'd had a podcast with Medicines New Zealand's Graeme Jarvis about how we risked being stuck at the back of another queue - this time on procuring effective antivirals. Looks like Pharmac is now getting on top of this, with an order in for molnupiravir. Fingers crossed.
- Jacob Grier on respecting the agency of smokers and on the illiberalism of prohibitionism. He's right.
The last month has been utterly mad. There was an old Roger Douglas line about the reforms in the 1980s moving too fast for opposition to them to mount. Labour's basically doing that again, but mostly in the wrong directions, in the middle of a pandemic, while not being appropriately on top of the pandemic stuff.
It's not ideal.
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