"Dear Siouxie, the days of making excuses for the Ardern Government's incompetence are well and truly over."

As New Zealanders by the score are waking up to the realisation that our tiny island nation of five million is not really a 'team' after all, much of the gloss is wearing off the Labour Party's abilities to truly govern. 

It's not like we're a huge country - we don't rate a blip compared to the US - so it really shouldn't be so hard for Jacinda Ardern to sort out some of our more basic problems.

Once upon a time Jacinda's supporters simply shrugged off her inadequacies with "well, she inherited the problems from National" but that starts to look a little like a thrice-inherited hand-me-down pair of overalls when we get to this point in her regime. The whole Covid strategy thing is starting to get tatty and threadbare, and even the most ardent fan of NZ's once most-loved Prime Minister cannot help but notice she is beginning to look more and more like the fabled naked Emperor. The only people who can't seem to see it are Jacinda herself, and the flurry of irrelevants who continue to stand by her no matter how bad it makes them look.

I go to Stuff this morning to get my daily read over a coffee before I get out of bed - I don't have to get up this morning, we're in lockdown, remember! - and the first thing I see is an opinion piece with the catchy title "Blood clots suggest NZ on the correct Covid-19 course". This'll be good, I thought, wonder who wrote it? Oh. Siouxie Wiles. She-of-the-pink-hair. There's always been something a little bit suspicious about this woman's inclusion in the Covid team. She doesn't have the creds to overrule international opinion from leading WHO virologists, but she seems to think we should listen to her above them all the same. Perhaps because of, I dunno, gender ideology or something?

Anyway, I read it. I immediately regretted doing so, because it inspired in me an instant rage. I became utterly livid at the duplicity of the woman, and the level of incompetent narrative people like her promote. In essence, Siouxsie says, a new study has found that people with Covid get blood clots therefore it makes them more 'at-risk' during and after some surgeries. But that's not all she said. Here's what she really said, from start to finish.

First Madam Pinky criticises the critics of Jacinda's lockdown and elimination strategies, calling them "pundits who believe they are experts in infectious diseases despite all evidence to the contrary". I want to point out a few things here. Firstly, lockdown is not an infectious disease. Secondly, the elimination strategy is not an infectious disease, and thirdly, some of the people criticising those two are in fact experts in infectious diseases.

I also want to point out, in reply to Siouxsie's insulting and factually incorrect statement above, that the elimination strategy is a fantasy (viruses being viruses), lockdown doesn't work to eliminate a virus among a population - rather it defers immunity gains until a later time and flattens the curve (which has always been the Government's goal), and thirdly (just to get it in there) our vaccination program is not designed to eliminate SARS-CoV-2 and it's variants, it merely lessens the physiological impact on the infected and the systemic impact on our pathetically inadequate health system in New Zealand.

Madam Pinky goes on to say that the attitudes of critics of lockdown and elimination strategies "has led to the emergence of more infectious and deadly variants of the virus, and will likely continue to do so." So much for her being an expert then. Most of us already know that coronaviruses mutate (viruses being viruses) - it's what they do. What people think of various strategies has nothing whatsoever to do with antigenic drift, or viral mutation. There is no evidence anywhere to suggest that the attitudes of humans creates viral mutation. That is an enormously erroneous and unscientific statement to make. Variants are going to emerge all on their own and they will continue to do so regardless of what we do. Therefore, the study that Pinky quotes in her opinion piece has nothing to do with whether or not NZ is "on the right course" with either its lockdown strategy or its elimination goal.

In fact though, the entire study is terribly unscientific. It sounds good, I'll grant you that. But under the covers where boy meets girl, it's a crock. And here's why. What She-of-the-Pink-Hair cannot tell us is probably the most important factor in any study seeking to link Covid-19 to blood clots pre-, during, or post- surgery. We don't know if any of the patients in the study were vaccinated with what is aptly named the "Clot Shot". AstraZeneca, the vaccine known to cause blood clots. Like most unscientific surverys of this kind, the authors of the survey simply don't include data that might potentially ruin their desired result. Feminists have been using the same data methods to tell us that all women are victims for decades. Any study looking into the rate of blood clots among people who either tested positive with a potentially faulty PCR test or were symptomatic of Covid-19 should at the very least attempt to establish whether or not its subjects had taken a vaccine which could both mimic the symptoms of Covid-19 and cause blood clots. It's science 101, and not rocket science either. Anything less than that is unscientific drivel - just a survey without any credibility to it.

The fact that Madam Pinky is trying to use this study to shore up support on behalf of her beloved Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, tells us only one thing:

Science we can indeed trust - but politically-driven, attention-seeking scientists not so much.