Sir John Key argues that right-wing political pressure, not the left, pushed Jacinda Ardern into New Zealand's 2020 lockdown. He warns that exiting lockdown is harder than entering it because reopening always leads to COVID circulation and deaths.
When New Zealand got locked down with COVID And I don't mean this in a political sense, because, you know, I really don't, but Jacinda got. Despite what people actually say, only reason she went, she actually went into full lockdown was because the right of politics was going to run these front page ads in the paper saying we should lock down, because that's what's happening. So it wasn't actually coming from the left, believe it or not, it was coming from the right. And they freaked out a bit and decided, okay, they lock down. And we started saying to them privately, look, getting in is going to be the easy bit. It's getting out that's going to be really hard. You've got to think about those decisions. And they just could never do that. And I think you have to accept sometimes when, when you make those decisions that there will be consequences. And the blunt reality is once you open up, there'll be Covid. Once there's Covid, some people will die.
