False positives and shots in the dark

Phase II of the Covid Royal Commission has reported back. And while there remains a gaping hole in the narrative, we have enough to know the "following the science" story was more spin than system.

Photo by Ed Us on Unsplash

Phase Two of the Royal Commission into COVID-19 has landed. This is the extended review ordered by the National-led government and follows on from Phase One, which had been commissioned by the previous Labour government.

Phase One, you may recall, was pretty clearly designed to avoid any finding of responsibility. Whole categories of accountability were placed out of scope. The Commission was instructed to rely heavily on publicly available material and gather additional information only “in a targeted way”.

The result was exactly what you would expect from a process with those instructions. Not without value, but not what you would design if you actually wanted to know what went wrong and who was accountable.

Phase Two has more bite. The four areas under review (vaccine approval and safety, vaccine mandates, lockdowns, and testing) were all serious exercises of state power that affected the rights of New Zealanders to move, associate with each other and work.

But before getting to what Phase Two found…

It is worth being clear about what it was legally required not to examine. The terms of reference mandate that it consider only key decisions made between February 2021 and October 2022. The period February 2020 to January 2021, which was when we built MIQ from nothing, passed core COVID legislation, launched the Alert Level system and locked down the entire country for the first time was off the table.

This is not a minor gap. The foundational year of pandemic governance has now received much less forensic scrutiny than the period that followed. We might be tempted to attribute this to a desire to avoid duplicating Phase One. But that would be far too charitable.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that the answer involves NZ First. The party postures like it is the blunt-spoken tribune of ordinary New Zealanders. But what it actually did during Jacinda Ardern’s first term was supply every critical vote that kept her government in office and COVID powers intact.

The decisions taken in that foundational year, the ones the inquiry is not examining, were taken by a government NZ First made. An inquiry that leaves that year largely unscrutinised is, whatever else it is, convenient for the party currently most invested in now making the most of performative populist outrage about COVID overreach.

Nevertheless, what we now do have is a clear and fairly comprehensive record of what went into some really big decisions for the country. And with the caveat that the times were unprecedented and we did not have the benefit of hindsight, there were some pretty bad findings.

On mandates

The Commission found that there was poor monitoring of vaccination requirements. The Vaccination Assessment Tool uptake was not tracked. Job losses and reinstatements were not tracked. Enforcement activity was not tracked.

Advice about whether to continue or remove mandates was therefore not based on quality data. It was simply impossible to determine how many workers were caught by mandates because the government didn’t think to collect that information.

So a policy affecting an unknown number of New Zealanders’ livelihoods was extended and modified without anyone in the system being able to say with confidence how many people it was affecting.

Cabinet papers and ministerial briefings, the report adds, did not explicitly discuss whether rights restrictions were proportionate to public health benefit. No real consideration was given to less restrictive alternatives.

So, in one of the most rights-intrusive policy eras in modern history, we have can have very little confidence that the people making the decisions had seriously grappled with whether they needed to go that far.

On myocarditis risk for children

For me, the most damning specific finding concerns under-18s. The COVID-19 Vaccine Technical Advisory Group recommended against requiring two doses for 12 to 17-year-olds due to myocarditis risk. That advice was not provided to ministers. There was no evidence it reached them.

So government mandates continued to reflect outdated advice while updated advice sat somewhere in the system, undelivered.

On testing

New Zealand banned rapid antigen tests in April 2020 and effectively extended the ban through 2021 orders, keeping access tightly controlled even as PCR demand grew and international alternatives became widely used. Some firms that had obtained RATs were told to stop using them and destroy remaining stock.

When Omicron arrived and the system buckled, average PCR processing times rose from 13 hours to 143 hours. Tens of thousands of tests went outstanding. Labs discarded samples too old to be clinically useful.

So the government simply failed to plan adequately for testing after the elimination phase as slow to adapt.

On lockdowns

By early October 2021, the government knew Auckland’s Delta lockdown was not going to achieve elimination. The Ministry of Social Development warned we were approaching the point where collateral costs would outweighed public health benefits. And yet the social impacts of lockdowns were not specifically and clearly tracked in Cabinet papers.

So the government was running an extraordinary intervention with a weak dashboard and no clear framework for determining when the model ceased working.

What this means

This is a record that should embarrass anyone who administered these policies. Not because the intentions were malicious but because the state imposed sweeping restrictions on ordinary life while failing to do the basic, boring work that would allow it to know whether those restrictions were working or causing more harm than they prevented.

That is a more serious finding than “the government was wrong”. It describes a system that treated the exercise of emergency power as the hard part, when the actual hard part (monitoring, transparency, adaption) was what it actually neglected.

You can see why National wanted this and Labour didn’t

For a Labour Party that spent years insisting it was “following the science,” this is an uncomfortable record. In some of the most consequential policy areas of the era, the evidential foundations were surprisingly thin. Monitoring was weak, proportionality analysis was absent, and critical advice sometimes never reached the people making the decisions. That is not what a gold-standard evidence-based system looks like.

The picture is not improved by the fact that key Labour figures, including former COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins, declined to appear before the inquiry’s public hearings.

Whether this is enough to puncture the pandemic mythology is another question. That particular lore was built on the premise of a competent, humane government doing difficult things carefully. What we now see is a government that claimed technocratic legitimacy while running systems that weren’t measuring what they needed to measure, recording what they needed to record, or adapting when the evidence suggested they should.