Neil Sands
New Zealand’s covid-19 response became “wobbly” in the latter stages of the pandemic and future responses should rely less on lockdown and vaccine mandates, the head of a royal commission into the coronavirus strategy says.
Epidemiologist Professor Tony Blakely presented the findings of phase one of the Royal Commission into Covid-19 Lessons Learned to the government today, outlining the findings of almost two years’ work.
Internal Affairs Brooke van Velden immediately released the report, which is available at https://www.covid19lessons.
In a briefing to journalists on Wednesday, Blakely provided a broad overview, acknowledging that mistakes were made in response to the health crisis that stretched social cohesion in Aotearoa New Zealand.
“We absolutely could have done better, but New Zealanders still did pretty well,” he said.
“You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to work out that it was a bit like a game of two halves: New Zealand did pretty well in the first year and then the wheels started to become a little bit wobbly. There’s no secret about that.
Tony Blakely
“Indeed, it’s hardly surprising for a pandemic that goes longer than a month, longer than six months, longer than 12 months. It’s going to be hard to maintain that social cohesion going forward.”
Blakely said the inquiry, set up by the former Labour-led government, had examined the impact of lockdowns and vaccine mandates, which were among the major concerns in the 13,000 public submissions received by the royal commission.
“We’ve looked very closely at the mandatory element of many of these public health and social measures…[and] tried to work out with the benefit of hindsight which were appropriate and which were starting to get a bit too far down the track,” he said.
“[While also] recognising that it’s very hard for the decision-makers to be doing that real time.”
Broad sweep
Blakely indicated the royal commission would look for a markedly different response from authorities if another pandemic erupted.
“We really want to be in a position where we don’t need to use lockdowns as much or as stringently,” he said. “And we really want to be in a position where we use vaccine mandates only where they have a meaningful and substantive benefit without incurring some of the harms.
“We learned a lot about the harms through the social cohesion that impacts. So, we have looked at those things really closely. We’re not the only country to do that.”
Blakely pointed to Australia, where a review of the covid-19 response released last month found many people had lost trust in government and would not accept lockdowns after their experiences during the pandemic.
He cited former NSW premier Dominic Perrottet, who said in a recent speech that the vaccine mandates he introduced at the time were wrong and “the law should have left more room for respect of freedom”.
Blakely will step down from his role now that phase one of the inquiry is over, making way for Grant Illingworth KC to chair phase two.
The second phase was demanded by the ACT and NZ First parties as part of the coalition agreement to form government because they felt phase one’s terms of reference were too restrictive.
But Blakely defended the scope of his work.
“The terms of reference for phase one, contrary to many people’s perception or arguments, are broad, and the current report is broad,” he said, adding that it examined issues such as vaccine procurement, lockdown, government decision-making, social cohesion, border controls, regional impacts and provision of social support services.
Blakely said an area where he struggled was dealing with disinformation and getting accurate data out to the population.
“One of the lessons from the pandemic, is that sometimes it is useful to combat mis- and disinformation directly, sometimes not,” he said. “It’s something that we’re learning as we go. So that’s as much as I can say. It was a challenging issue.”
Asked if he thought phase two was needed, given the work he had already put in, Blakely replied: “They’re really going to build on top of what we’ve done.
“We probably got 80% of the stuff that you can get as far as findings, lessons and recommendations across the broad sweep of it.
“Phase two will look at some of the extra 20%, but sometimes the 20% is important, so the second phase may well find some extra information about the lockdowns or vaccine mandates that we didn’t quite unearth, and add value.”
The second phase of the royal commission is due to report in February 2026.
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