'Avatar' Director James Cameron Makes Wild, Inaccurate Claims About COVID To Criticize US

They just can't let it go. The COVID extremists, despite being comprehensively and repeatedly proven wrong, can never give up on the unearned sense of superiority that "the experts" gave them. 

This phenomenon became readily apparent almost immediately. Hordes of people were overjoyed to comply with lockdowns, mask mandates, business restrictions and vaccine passports. "Follow the science" became a pseudoreligious fanaticism. There were literal shrines to Anthony Fauci, or small figurines made depicting him as some kind of saint. 

The realities of COVID outcomes never mattered to the religious devotees. Individual liberty, established freedoms, government authoritarianism. None of it mattered. Instead, whatever Fauci said must be followed. Whatever made them feel like a good and virtuous person must be the only behavioral option. That's what matters most. 

RELATED: New Emails From Anthony Fauci And Francis Collins Show More Purposeful Dishonesty On COVID Vaccines

One of the best examples of this insane, delusional attitude comes from "Avatar: Fire and Ash" director James Cameron. Cameron, whose career has devolved into making endless remakes of "Pocahontas" without a single original or valuable idea or insight to offer, just gave an interview demonstrating, in one magnificently idiotic paragraph, why the religious fanatics are so beyond saving.

James Cameron attends the "Avatar: Fire And Ash" European Premiere on December 05, 2025, in Boulogne-Billancourt, France. (Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images)

James Cameron Praises New Zealand, Criticizes USA

Cameron, speaking to Graham Besinger, made the wild, completely unsupported claim that New Zealand "eliminated" COVID-19 "completely." 

"After the pandemic hit… [New Zealand] had eliminated the virus completely," he said, via Variety. "They actually eliminated the virus twice. The third time when it showed up in a mutated form, it broke through. But fortunately, they already had a 98% vaccination rate. This is why I love New Zealand."

This is, of course, insane. But he wasn't done there. According to him, the lower COVID vaccination rate in the United States is insane, and shows the country is "turning its back on science."

"People there are, for the most part, sane as opposed to the United States where you had a 62% vaccination rate, and that’s going down — going the wrong direction," he added. "Where would you rather live? A place that actually believes in science and is sane and where people can work together cohesively to a common goal, or a place where everybody’s at each other’s throats, extremely polarized, turning its back on science and basically would be in utter disarray if another pandemic appears."

This is, of course, fanatically, viciously false. But what else would you expect from someone with an ego the size of a large planet? 

First, New Zealand never "eliminated" anything. As an isolated island territory, they were able to close their country off to the outside world, an option not available to large interconnected countries like the United States, or geographic regions like, you know, literally everywhere else. Closing your country doesn't mean the virus is gone, just like closing the refrigerator door doesn't mean that you've eliminated all milk from humanity. 

Sure enough, that's exactly what happened, which Cameron acknowledges, though glosses over. New Zealand couldn't remain closed forever. So when they opened, the virus came right back in. Which is because New Zealand didn't eliminate the virus, as the spectacularly incompetent Cameron claimed.

Elimination means elimination. It doesn't mean "a temporary reprieve due to extenuating circumstances that disappears as soon as those circumstances are removed."

Cameron praises New Zealand for taking a policy option that is simply not available to the United States, then excuses this failure by saying it worked out anyway because New Zealand had achieved high vaccination rates. Well, they did, and it didn't matter in the slightest. Per their government's latest data reporting, roughly 56 percent of the country has tested positive for COVID, a 56k per 100k cumulative case rate. According to the World Health Organization data dashboard, the US has a 31.3k per 100k cumulative case rate. Which is a bigger number, 56 or 31? 

This is the country that Cameron says follows science and does things the right, "sane" way, unlike the insane, anti-science United States. 

New Zealand does have a much lower COVID mortality rate than the US, but COVID mortality figures are heavily influenced by criteria, financial incentives, and most importantly, underlying population health. New Zealand also had significantly higher COVID death rates than countries like Egypt, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kenya, Somalia, Belarus, and Cuba. Why doesn't Cameron praise those countries for their science-based policies, or move to one of those exemplary, "sane" countries, one wonders?

And, of course, virtually all of New Zealand's reported COVID-associated deaths came after the country had achieved those exceptional vaccination rates Cameron praises.

But you know, data and information that contradict his religious fervor must be discarded for being inconvenient. Science and sanity indeed.

Even better, it was just this week that the former head of the CDC, Dr. Robert Redfield, one of those experts that Cameron ostensibly worships, said that the COVID vaccine shouldn't even be called a vaccine because it does nothing to stop transmission or infection. 

"The vaccine should never have been mandated, it was never meant to prevent transmission, it didn't prevent transmission," he said. "It probably was a misnomer to call it a vaccine. It's really more like a medicine, it doesn't stop infection. Children should have never been vaccinated, people shouldn't have been mandated to be vaccinated to go to school and work. So the policy part was totally misplayed."

Virtually all of those policies were enacted and viciously enforced by the New Zealand government. Their fearless, incompetent leader, Jacinda Arden, even said at one point that "We will continue to be your sole source of truth. Unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth." 

Now you have an actual medical expert saying the New Zealand government, the science-following crowd Cameron praises, was not following science, was unnecessarily and unfairly discriminating against unvaccinated people, and undermines their claims about vaccine efficacy.

It all comes back to the unearned attitude of superiority. What actually happened, what "the science" actually shows, is unimportant to people like James Cameron. What matters is that he looks down on Americans as being stupid, insane, and noncompliant. He is compliant, and listens to the "correct" political ideology, which makes him smart, sane, sophisticated, and superior. Does it matter that he's demonstrably wrong? Of course not, he can't be wrong. He lives in New Zealand.