Kate Hawkesby: We've said goodbye to traffic lights, please can we say goodbye to the epidemiologists

So the Government’s looking at potential scope for a Covid review, and “taking advice”. That in and of itself should ring alarm bells given no government has ordered more reviews than this lot. They ordered reviews like a teenager ordering Uber Eats with their parents credit card. Reviews all round, bugger the expense. So now to pause, reflect, and take advice, seems out of character. It seems a stalling technique.  That aside, the taking advice bit is the other thing this Government’s record has been questionable on. They talked a big game – and often – about all the ‘advice’ they were taking – but then more times than not, didn’t take any of it. Case and point being anything Treasury ever said to them. It included advice from the business sector, real people, organisations, even their own review committees. But one sector they did seem to take a lot of advice from during Covid was the domain of the scientist and the epidemiologist. And fair enough, in the early days of confusion and uncertainty around a virus and a global pandemic, they were the experts they should hear from. But where and when to draw the line? At what point did the ‘experts’ go beyond their remit? At what point do the scientists sit down and the epidemiologists accept there’s more to life than looking at everything from the lens of a lab. Things like the fact there’s an economy to think about, a tourism industry, people’s mental health, livelihoods, businesses and so on.  Yes the science and the warnings about hygiene, masks, surfaces, germs and closed spaces were all vital at the time.. but two years on, with fewer than a thousand cases in the community. With even our ‘abundance of caution’ Government saying it‘s time to retire the restrictions, why are the epidemiologists still front page screaming that the sky will fall in? The fear and the panic is over. Read the room. Yet still they have a platform to preach fear.  It’s not helpful to have the likes of Michael Baker and Rod Jackson saying we need to keep some masks, some controls, some restrictions. Baker claims we should look at “whether we should have a vaccination requirement for travellers, whether we should use testing technology as part of the arrival process into New Zealand.” He reckons we “shouldn't just abandon all controls at the borders." I tell you what we should abandon, the epidemiologists. Thank you for your service, thank you for your insight, thanks for the memories. Time to exit stage left.  We do not need this kind of advice running or trying to run our country. It’s beyond their remit, it’s beyond their scope, it only views things myopically from the comfort and luxury of a privileged position with no real connection to the real world. They’re not running a business, they’re not running a ski field or a bungy jump or a hotel or a café or a retail shop.  What we need now is normality, tourists, punters, and some basic freedoms back. We can’t live in fear of future pandemics forever. We can’t keep pinging guests to this country in a paranoid fervour of fear. We’ve waved goodbye to the traffic lights, now let’s please wave goodbye to the epidemiologists.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.