Lessons from the Covid-19 response inquiry

Source: Radio New Zealand

The Royal Commission of Inquiry into the pandemic on Tuesday afternoon released its second report, sparked by public disquiet that its first report did not dig deep enough.

The 500-plus-page report looks at what it calls some of the “most difficult and divisive responses around vaccines and mandates”.

“The adequacy of the processes used to assess and monitor the safety of vaccines” was one of those.

It eked out a pass mark, but with a very big but for the previous government’s efforts to shift the “team of five million” from an early, pretty effective elimination strategy to suppression and minimisation in 2021 and 2022.

“Many of the people we heard from expressed pain and anger about the impacts of the pandemic and response. Some of these impacts on people’s lives continue to this day,” the report said.

“It is clear, however, that ministers and officials were facing a series of complex, high-stakes decisions in a rapidly changing environment and were doing the best they could at the time. Evidence shows New Zealand had among one of the best pandemic responses in the world.”

‘Very bumpy ride’

It was, however, “far from smooth”.

A “very bumpy ride” was how Labour itself summed it up earlier in the day. Though its former top two, Dame Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson, also defended it: “We got a lot right. More than most.”

National immediately used the phase two report to pound Labour.

Asked if his predecessors were just being cautious – it was an unprecedented global crisis, as Labour pointed out – Health Minister Simeon Brown told reporters:

“I think they were putting options to Cabinet, which were not backed up by advice,” Brown said.

“And the reality is Chris Hipkins stood up every single day and he said to New Zealanders that he was making decisions based on advice by health officials… The reality is, in a number of these instances, he was not.”

They did not heed warnings from Treasury about inflation-stoking Covid-19 spending that half the time went on non-Covid things, Brown added.

“We are feeling those consequences today,” Brown said.

In a half-hour stand-up, Brown said “ultimately” 13 times.

“Ultimately, some of those decisions, you will have to put those questions to the ministers who made those decisions at the time as to why they made them,” he said.

Hipkins put their approach at the time entirely opposite: “considered, appropriate and guided by the best evidence available at the time”.

The decisions saved lives, though the responses caused hardship, he said.

NZ has so far reported 4500 deaths due to Covid-19 to the World Health Organisation. That is slightly fewer per capita than Australia, well below Canada’s and about four times less than the US and UK.

What are the lessons for Next Time?

While everyone disagreed on what 20/20 hindsight has shown from the inquiry, everyone agrees on the need to do better now to prepare for next time.

So what are the lessons from phase two for Covid 2.0?

Two words: Be prepared.

“The stakes were immense. Each choice carried the weight and quality of lives in the balance. Yet policy-makers could not delay some hard choices,” the report said.

But the “lack of planning for alternative future strategies” that applied to PCR testing was a common shortcoming elsewhere, too.

Going in next time armed already with better research on pandemics and impacts, better strategies for getting the best advice, and some basic pandemic legislation are among the 24 recommendations.

Two more words: Be smarter.

“Decision-makers told us they learned the importance of giving people an end date, or some indication of ‘light at the end of the tunnel’,” the report said.

Without that, people resisted more and more.

Now we know for next time. But the country had to get a better grip on social impacts ahead of next time, by finding ways to build trust and social cohesion, and ways to demonstrate to people the hard science behind “hard choices”, the report said.

In addition to the main report, an extra 300 pages laid out what people who submitted to the inquiry said.

“People frequently told us that the vaccine mandates caused division in society that lingers to this day,” said this last report.

Things got out of balance. “Wobbles” was how it was put after the first phase report.

Cutting the ‘wobbles’

It needn’t have got that bad is one conclusion that can be drawn from the second phase report.

Lockdown decisions, for one, required weighing up health versus bank balances, from Gore to Papakura.

Decision-makers had to weigh up many more factors than public health goals and social disruption, and think about tomorrow, not just today and impacts on this group, versus that group, and eroding.

“Based on the evidence we have heard, that is exactly what they tried to do,” said the main report.

Trying came up short, though, when painful and untested initiatives created pressures, or helped birth mis-and-disinformation, that upset forecasts and analyses or exploited gaps in them, among a public increasingly prone to doubting the experts.

The officials doing the trying lacked enough analysis of lockdown’s impacts on education, for instance (page 270).

They lacked enough evidence fullstop.

“Ideally, though, decision-makers would have been better supported with clearer, more specific evidence about the effects of public health measures.”

That cut down the options to choose from.

“More comprehensive and robust response strategies should have been in preparation much earlier.”

Being smart required being prepared.

The first phase report ran to 716 pages; some of its lessons were discussed two years ago at the Science Media Centre.

There will not be a part three. The commission received more than 31,000 submissions from individuals and organisations, and obtained 8000 documents from government agencies.

“We are satisfied that we were thoroughly well-informed.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand