Summarised by Centrist
In an interview with journalist Chris Lynch, Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters raged against the previous government and the media for their handling of COVID.
“When you get someone, as the Prime Minister then did, saying this is the Podium of Truth, and the media went along with it, it tells me what a compliant little bunch of (how shall I say it?) democratic retards they are,” he said.
Peters used the word “disgusting” on multiple occasions to describe the media “gaslighting” the public and pushing the previous government’s narrative around the pandemic response.
“If they were true patriots and true democrats, they’d be screaming out for answers,” he exclaimed.
Peters blasted the lockdown measures, which he believes were premised on “flimsy” evidence and the portrayal of the vaccine’s effectiveness.
“Internationally, all this evidence is emerging where people took the vaccine and got seriously ill or died, but they didn’t want to have any of that,” Peters fumed.
“And here you’ve got the public media trying to excuse all that,” he said.
He argues that the current Royal Commission of Inquiry chair, Tony Blakely, has a conflict of interest due to prior advisory roles with the government.
“We just want to know what happened,” Peters said, when asked what he hoped to get from the Inquiry’s second phase.
