The United States of America has a lot of very obvious, glaring problems that seem to get more glaring and more obvious with each passing day. Some people who have the means may reasonably choose to just leave the country altogether. James Cameron is one such person, though he decamped to New Zealand back in 2020 when COVID-19 surged around the world. As you might expect from the director, the issues he\u2019s recently raised have to do with the U.S.\u2019s current anti-science administration.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter the pandemic hit\u2026 [New Zealand] had eliminated the virus completely,\u201d Cameron said on an episode of In Depth with Graham Bensinger (via Variety<\/a>). \u201cThey 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. People there are, for the most part, sane as opposed to the United States where you had a 62% vaccination rate, and that\u2019s going down \u2013 going the wrong direction.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Cameron, who was born in Canada and officially got New Zealand citizenship last year, doesn\u2019t have any intention of leaving. \u201cWhere would you rather live?\u201d he asked. \u201cA 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\u2019s at each other\u2019s throats, extremely polarized, turning its back on science and basically would be in utter disarray if another pandemic appears.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n It is true that New Zealand was world-renowned for its handling of COVID<\/a>. The country has also been a fairly popular filming destination; the Lord Of The Rings series was famously shot there, and Cameron has been talking about filming in the country since at least 2013<\/a>. Though the country is obviously beautiful, the director says in the podcast appearance, \u201cI\u2019m not there for scenery, I\u2019m there for the sanity.\u201d\u00a0 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The United States of America has a lot of very obvious, glaring problems that seem to get more…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":433036,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":["post-433035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=433035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433035\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/433036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=433035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=433035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=433035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}