‘If you think I’m an Ardern puppet, you’ll get a huge surprise when you open the report,’ Prof Tony Blakely says

Thursday, 28 November 2024

There have been 76 reports or inquiries into various elements of the Covid-19 pandemic in New Zealand. The latest will be released this afternoon and is the biggest so far: a Royal Commission of Inquiry. But it’s only ‘Phase One’. Explainer Editor Lloyd Burr sat down with Chair Tony Blakely who talked about Voices For Freedom, Jacinda Ardern, and why Winston Peters has beef with him.

In February 2023, epidemiologist Dr Tony Blakely and his fellow commissioners began work on a Royal Commission of Inquiry into Covid-19. It was set up by the previous Labour government with a relatively broad remit to examine the government’s response to the pandemic, its decision-making, engagement, and communication.

It was also tasked with looking at how the health system coped, the economic response and impact, the lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and impacts of the provision of goods and services. Essentially, it aims to find out what did and didn’t work, what lessons can be learned, and how to prepare for something similar to happen again.

The final report with its 39 recommendations will be delivered to Internal Affairs Minister Brooke van Velden at 2pm today, and hopefully released publicly not long after.

Also at 2pm, Dr Blakely will no longer be in charge of the Royal Commission, not because it’s finished but because the new Coalition Government didn’t want him to oversee additional work tacked onto the inquiry called ‘Phase Two’.

It will look at vaccine efficacy, vaccine injuries, social division, disruption to businesses, and a few other elements which New Zealand First and ACT demanded as part of the coalition agreement with National. The chair for Phase Two will be litigation specialist Grant Illingworth KC.

I sat down with Dr Blakely for a wide-ranging discussion about the inquiry.

On what makes this inquiry different from all the previous ones:

“We have looked at reports done by many other agencies and people like Brian Roche who have done specific reports and there have been various inquiries on bits and pieces like on MIQ, but there's been no inquiry that's done the whole shebang,” he says.

“That's what we're doing. Our terms of reference - contrary to what you may see or what people may comment on - are actually very broad.

“Our report will cover things like the vaccination roll out, vaccine mandates, lockdowns, health services - both on how they responded to the pandemic virus stuff as well as how they keep business as usual going or not, the social and economic response, the decision making at the central government level.”

On the public submissions they received and the general tone of them:

“We received 26,000 public submissions but half of them were in response to Phase Two so we went through around 13,000 of them.

“We have engaged through 400 face-to-face meetings with 1600 people ranging from ex-Prime Ministers through to people packing the shelves at PakN’Sav who are doing the essential work, experts in policy and the Reserve Bank governor.

“The submissions were considered,” he says. “The expectation in any submission process where you're seeking to get public comment is you're probably going to hear more about the things that didn't go well because people are more motivated to say that.

“That said, there were still a lot of submissions saying we did really well. There were a lot of people saying the lockdowns went on too long.

“We had a diversity of views, which is what you see in all countries and what you'd expect for something so monolithic, so big, so impactful as Covid.

“The common theme about it though is that harm was done. People couldn't get back into the country to see their dying relatives. They couldn't go to the hospital even though they lived in the same town or because of the lockdown, their business went under.

“I don't want to give away too much, but certainly I think that New Zealand did pretty well.

“At least in the first half, the wheels got wobbly in the second half and we could have done better and that's where we focus a lot of our attention,” he says.

On whether we are better prepared for another pandemic now than before Covid-19:

“We would do better because we've learned a lot,” he says. “That better preparation is about investing in your health workforce, your infrastructure, your IT systems and it's not just spending all your money on pandemic preparedness.

“The most obvious no-brainer is your public health workforce. Those people are going to stand up and do the contact tracing work with the labs to do all the testing, go and visit people and make sure they've got food.

“You need to have sufficient size of that workforce and the ability to scale it to surge it. You need a rump, you need a base.”

Has that “base” or “rump” gotten bigger or smaller since the pandemic?

“I'll leave you to look that up,” he says. “Every country is struggling with providing the health services that their citizens need or want. And it's hardly surprising because of aging populations - I'm talking across the board before we even get to a pandemic - and because we've got more medical treatments and we've got more things we can do,” says Dr Blakely.

On whether they found any evidence the government was poisoning people with the vaccines:

“No, we found no evidence of that,” he says.

On meeting with anti-vax groups like Voices for Freedom:

“We did that respectfully. I found our engagements with Voices for Freedom incredibly illuminating. We got a lot out of it - we're not going to agree with everything they said - but there were some things they said that we found important because these were real issues for a substantial minority of the New Zealand population,” he says.

“On an issue that they may well speak to, when you've got a virus that mutates from Delta to Omicron and it's now mutated such that the vaccines really aren't stopping the transmission very much, you do have to as a government be very agile in changing your way that you deploy your vaccines.

“The new virus is not responding to the vaccines but we've still got these vaccine rules over here, they've got a valid point,” he says.

On mis- and dis-information:

“We struggled with that issue. It's really hard to find the silver bullet from this. As a commission, we struggled with it but I think everybody is struggling with it.

“We do consider it and we offer up our considerations for others to build on and try and work out what to do about this in the society.

“As a society, we need to create forums, safe places, respectful places where debate can happen,” Dr Blakely says.

“It's a challenge because we were too quick to write off a lot of people's concerns”.

On whether vaccine mandates were wrong:

“We make findings on vaccine mandates but when we make findings, I want to make it very clear, we're not here as a blame inquiry. So rather than making a negative finding, we make judgements when necessary to underpin the lessons that then underpin the recommendations.

“The trick here is not to say mandates are right or wrong. It’s to actually think about the principles, the proportionality, the things to be considered because the next poor bugger who has to make these decisions in 20 or 40 years time, it'll be a different set of circumstances, but they need those principles. They need to be able to think”.

On the inquiries recommendations:

“Those who think that Dr Blakely is a patsy for the previous government and really thinks everything they did was entirely correct and thinks that compulsory measures were great, you'll get a huge surprise when you open that report,” he says.

“If you are another type of person who is thinking that it was all done wrong and any sense of collectivism was incorrect, and we should have a completely libertarian society where everybody does everything by themselves with no rules and stuff, you'll also be surprised and shocked at what we say.

“Unsurprisingly, we're sort of in that middle ground and trying to find the lessons there because that's what it's about.

“We could have done a report that had 125 recommendations of do more, do more, do more, do more, do more. We're not. We've got 39 recommendations.

“We're careful in those recommendations to make it very clear that you can't do everything and you need to prioritise. So our recommendations speak to the need to weigh things up and we do all that weighing up in our inquiry.

On what the overall conclusion of the report is without saying what’s in the report:

“It's about societies and governments thinking ahead to what the scenarios are and working out where to invest.

“We can't afford to do that separately for pandemics, earthquakes, bioterrorism, cybersecurity, too small a country and it'll be inefficient.

“Our recommendations hopefully hit the spot whereby it's nudging society to think about managing risk more generically.

“This century is about risks more than the last century. In my view, climate change, aging populations, cybersecurity - these are the sort of things that we are considering as a society.

On how he’s changed since the beginning of the inquiry:

“I've learned lots of new things. I've learned new things by speaking to Kiwis. I've learned new things from Voices for Freedom - we've had some really useful engagements with them. I've learned things from international literature.

“I have moved my thinking during the pandemic when I was a commentator. And I've moved my thinking, for example, on vaccine mandates or at least come to a more definitive arrival destination,” he says.

On why he’s not the chair of Phase Two:

“Two reasons. One is I've actually got another job, I've got to get back to and I committed to doing the inquiry as it was initially set up,” he says.

“And second, I don't think the current government particularly wanted me to be around for Phase Two.

“There have been challenges against my lack of perceived lack of independence. I strongly disagree. I think I was ideally suited to chair an inquiry because I'm an epidemiologist and public health medicine specialist.”

On why the Luxon government thinks he’s a puppet of the Ardern government:

“You may well say that the loudest proponent of that is the Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters and he'll have his reasons for doing that,” he says.

Do the pair have history? Do they have beef with one another, I ask.

“This would be the strongest beef he's had with me. I don't have beef with him, but his strongest beef with me would be on this particular issue,” says Dr Blakely.

On whether ‘Phase Two’ could come to different conclusions to ‘Phase One’:

“They will embrace the Inquiries Act in the same way that we did to be independent and impartial,” he says.

“They may turn over some stones that we didn't get to and they may find something in there that we didn't know about.”

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