Summary
New Zealand’s royal commission into its Covid-19 response found vaccine mandates were reasonable based on available data but acknowledged they harmed social cohesion.
The report praised the country’s elimination strategy for achieving one of the lowest Covid death rates among developed nations while preventing healthcare system collapse.
However, it criticized prolonged lockdowns, weak health system preparedness, and a lack of planning for future crises.
Commissioners urged broad investment in pandemic readiness and emphasized the importance of both frontline and planning staff.
A second phase of the inquiry will review vaccine harms and conclude in 2026.
Reasonable is great when it comes to this kind of thing.
There’s a new government and a complete shift in power. The enquiry is neutral. Nobody’s patting themselves on the back.
Yep. The people who brought the enquiry would love for it to criticise the covid response, as they were the ones cheerleading the naysayers
I’m not against the NZ covid response, but it was far from perfect. And if you actually read the enquiry, it does make a lot of criticism on many aspects. It’s not just this headline.
I moved to NZ about 7 years ago and lived through this. I supported the earlier lockdowns and got the vaccine before it became mandated.
Having said that, the mandates that the government pursued were absolutely ruthless, and put in place at a time where efficacy was already reduced due to new variants. It did a lot of harm to society, and we still live with those consequences today.
a lot of harm to society
You mean one of the lowest per capita death rates of any country with transparent reporting? Explain to me how saving tens of thousands of lives in New Zealand was bad without sounding like a dickhead…
From the report:
Contentious public health measures like vaccine mandates wore away at what had initially been a united wall of public support for the pandemic response; along with the rising tide of misinformation and disinformation, this created social fissures that have not entirely been repaired.
Yeah, misinformation from conspiracists and right wing politicians wore at the publics resolve and found a home the hearts of other reactionaries and conspiracists. That’s the truth, but it’s not a fault of thee covid response, it’s a fault of people who view society as an enemy
We had less deaths than we would have had normally. We also saved a bucket load of jobs by supporting businesses. We, objectively, did better than pretty much anyone else. What seems to continually escape people’s attention is that the NZ health system is shit. We have fuck all hospital beds and fuck all staff. Letting the virus run free would have overrun our system in days. A better health system that ours might have more options than we did, but as it was, we did bloody well.
Having said that, the mandates that the government pursued were absolutely ruthless
Good.
and put in place at a time where efficacy was already reduced due to new variants.
“Reduced” is not the same as “safe.”
It did a lot of harm to society, and we still live with those consequences today.
Like what? What horrible burden are you living with in New Zealand because of this?
Thank. You.
Ez upvote holy fuck I’d trade places in a second as an anti-authoritarian, high-covid-risk person ill absolutely take that deal vs living in the land of the walking small pox blankets where the Small Business ™️ must flow.
The absolute fucking gall of comparing that to the 14 characteristics of fascism. Must be nice to be so insulated.
Why is it good they were ruthless? Did you live here? Do you know what happened? Is it based on science to force mandates on a population that’s already 95 percent vaccinated? Because it was definitely not what our Ministry of Health recommended…
At the time the mandates were active, Auckland was 95 percent vaxed and rife with covid. At that stage, was it worth it telling five percent of the population they were not allowed to be anywhere but in a supermarket? Was it reasonable taking their jobs away from them? Did the costs outweigh the benefits?
The government’s covid response did a lot of damage to NZ. My wife is a therapist and works with victims of sexual and domestic abuse. Turns out that locking people up with their abusers for months on end is… Very bad for people too.
Vax mandates lead to a huge division in society, including racial and political divides. It will take a long time to recover from that.
I’m not saying all lockdowns are bad, I’m not saying vaccines are bad, I’m saying there’s a cost benefit analysis to be made, and NZ definitely went above and beyond what was reasonable. Towards the end, cabinet kept going against ministry recommendations. Their covid response had become a political tool, not a response based on reason.
“My wife is a therapist, trust me bro” is not the evidentiary argument you seem to think it is.
Massive mental health impacts for one. Did you live in Auckland throughout COVID? If not then I don’t think you can comment on this.
Everyone wants to talk about fascism these days, but give covid restrictions a complete pass. I’ve never seen anything like that in my lifetime, where you actually couldn’t go to restaurants without a pass, and had to have papers in order to justify being out in public. Even if you think it was justified, you have to acknowledge that it was extreme authoritarianism.
I saw people lose their jobs and get excluded from society in a city that was 95 percent vaccinated, while somehow all my vaccinated friends and myself were sick of covid.
The level of punitive damage done by the mandates was beyond scientific reason. It also went against ministry of health recommendations.
Is it authoritarian to say you shouldn’t drive without a license? Is it authoritarian to say you shouldn’t drink and drive?
Yeah i suppose it is technically authoritarian, but society is overwhelmingly ok with it since it is indisputably a good idea. Covid restrictions did not have universal agreement, weren’t as obviously effective and common sense, were unconstitutional in some cases, but most of all too new to have trust from everyone, particularly when messaging was inconsistent or logically flawed.
I’ll never forget watching NZ come out of lockdown and seeing people hug each other while I was still sanitizing groceries.
They were having rugby games while the rest of the world burned down in flames
Are you saying that New Zealand returned to normal before the rest of the world? Because that’s not how I remember it at all.
IIRC New Zealand returned to actual normal, as in COVID was a relative non-issue, faster than many other countries. Their restrictions were more severe and weren’t lifted very quickly, but when they were lifted things were actually fine.
Places like the US and much of Canada dropped restrictions while things were still pretty bad in terms of infection rates and strain on health care systems, and really they hardly enforced them to begin with. You could see this as a return to normalcy since restrictions were gone, but in Alberta they lifted restrictions when we were still dealing with plenty of deaths, severely impacted health care, and on top of that we were still figuring out the implications of the whole long COVID thing. That’s not a return to normal, I don’t think, it’s pretending things are normal when they’re not.
NZ had relatively a very short lock down and were one of the few oecd countries that was back to regular life in 2020. Other than wearing masks in certain places you could go to restaurants, movies, regular shops etc.
Eventually there was another lock down, for most of the country it was much shorter. One town had to go longer though cause they kept having cases pop up.
We had a four week (incredibly strict) lockdown in 2020 and then life returned to normal because we eliminated the virus. In late 2021 the delta variant ruined all that and the government attempted a half-assed lockdown which didn’t do much and that’s where a lot of the anger came from.
I feel that this is when social media really showed how much harm it could do to spread misinformation. Good on NZ.
