2025 NZ Royal Commission COVID-19 Lessons Learned

Royal Commission COVID-19 Lessons Learned purpose:

'to learn from Aotearoa New Zealand's experience of the pandemic to prepare for the future'.

Phase 2 (Submission deadline April 27, 2025) examination of key decisions that took place between February 2021 and October 2022 in these areas:

The use of vaccines to manage COVID-19
The use of lockdowns in 2021 and 2022
Testing, tracing, and other public health tools.

PSGR'S SUBMISSION TO THE ROYAL COMMISSION

(this webpage contains the introduction, contents page & recommendations in Part [5]) Read full submission here (PDF)):

‘Legislation should be constitutionally sound—Legislation should be consistent with the Treaty of Waitangi and should reflect the fundamental values and principles of a democratic society, including in the processes by which it is made.’ Legislation Guidelines 2021 Edition

INTRODUCTION

We hope to draw to the attention of the Commissioners a recognition of the systemic flaws in government, and that these systemic, overlapping flaws signal a dire warning, and emphasise the need for a call to action for system reform. We make suggestions in section [5] to illustrate how this may be achieved.

The principles enshrined in the Health Act 1956 were unethically set aside in the parent legislation[1]: Paramount consideration of protection of health; respect for individuals; voluntary compliance; the individual to be informed; principle of proportionality; the least restrictive alternative; and that measures apply no longer than necessary.

COVID-19 showed New Zealanders that the processes we took for granted, are easily disassembled and dispensed with. Regulatory rigor, select committee processes, the legislative process, the executive, information flows, can all be managed in service of a single goal that lacks an ethical evidence base.

PSGR’s submission emphasises a deep procedural injustice that was imposed on the people of New Zealand. Our case concerns the government machinations between October-December 2021 that PSGR considers was deceptive, misleading, unfair and unjust.

This period was the time of the most egregious displays of human rights abuses by the Crown, including the human right to freedom and to health. We emphasise, where health means:

‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.’

The rights abuses were enabled because the government officials failed to consider scientific information and evidence that contradicted their world view. Officials ‘narrowed their minds’ and ignored a compendium of evidence that demonstrated that ongoing lockdowns, mandates and prevention of movement (i.e. freedoms) did not reflect the state of evidence from mid-2021 onwards.

PSGR emphasise that the avoidance of such a corrupted process, so that future generations may not have similar injustices imposed on them, requires a complex and coordinated response. Such a response requires the reacquainting of the public and officials with a layering of education and knowledge that includes public law, public health ethics, basic science and nutrition education, principles of public health and long-established epidemiological understanding that, for a century, has informed the practice of management of an infectious disease outbreak.

Censorship of public health doctors and general practitioners, scientists, ethicists, epidemiologists and other groups with expertise in chronic and communicable disease and the role of population health was a global phenomenon. Experts who differed from the global consensus points were silenced and techniques were used to shame and delegitimise their authority.[2] [3]

In March 2021, when the full roll-out to the entire population, the press release noted that:

‘the biggest factor in lifting COVID-19 restrictions will be a timely and high uptake of the vaccine.’

Most egregiously, there was no allowance for herd immunity. There was no consideration of the unjust nature of mandating the novel technology on healthy populations, and the role that herd immunity could play in dampening down transmission and infection.

PSGR’s October 11, 2021 submission[4] is provided (section [3] below) as evidence to the Royal Commissioners that Members of Parliament were provided with soundly formed evidence that the vaccine was not sterile and would not prevent transmission of infection, that there was significant evidence known in early October 2021 (even with only ten days to assemble a submission) that the vaccine was neither effective nor safe.

PSGR recommended prophylactic measures in in the form of medical (antiviral and antibiotic medications) nutritional and immune-support protocols. These should have been considered and applied to provide safety for all people at minimal cost and zero disruption to people and society. These could be taken from when infection from a virus was suspected, and reduce viral replication, and lower the risk of transmission, and reduce the likelihood that vulnerable populations would experience severe COVID-19. This protocol would have substantially reduced fear in the population.

As PSGR document below, the public’s concerns were ignored and not discussed in the Departmental and Select Committee reports. This is despite the fact that the Minister for Covid-19, at the same time this legislation was being debated in Parliament, was engaged in drafting the next legislation, which would precede a cavalcade of secondary legislation, the Orders that would mandate all New Zealanders over 12, in some way as an ‘affected person’.

The public, therefore, had no choice other than to reasonably trust that the Crown would take seriously its duty to protect health. The October-November 2021 Select Committee and Departmental Reports failed to summarise and disclose the evidence supplied by the public on the potential for waning, i.e. that the vaccine was leaky, and that evidence was accumulating that the vaccine could be harmful.

Protection, as per the Health Act 1956 should have ensured that the actions taken from 2020-2023 would be taken with utmost care, that the individual would be respected, and that policies would be based on the latest scientific evidence so as to protect health.

The Crown over this time had a fiduciary obligation to protect public health as the public had to trust that the Cabinet would act in the best interest of the individual, and the public would have to surrender to the laws that were subsequently made. The protection of the individual is critical, as harm from an intervention at an early age can result in decades of suffering, thus the benefits of an intervention to an elderly, frail person must be balanced against risk to healthy people. The Crown did not take such action.

If the Crown has the power to displace peoples’ rights and interests, and the peoples’ power to deal with this is restricted, it would seem that Crown’s power and the corresponding vulnerability of people, give rise to a fiduciary obligation on the part of the Crown. ‘The power to destroy or impair a people’s interests in this way is extraordinary and is sufficient to attract regulation by Equity to ensure that the position is not abused. The fiduciary relationship arises, therefore out of the power of the Crown…’[5]

This set the stage for rules that could be applied with little regard for scientific process and convention, yet that they would be applied on the basis ‘scientifically’ that they were preventing ‘potential adverse effects’.

Contents

[1] BACKGROUND.. 4

[2] THE LEGAL BASIS FOR POPULATION-LEVEL MANDATES. 12

[3] PSGR’S OCTOBER 11 2021 SELECT COMMITTEE SUBMISSION – MPS WERE INFORMED OF VACCINE RISKS & QUESTIONABLE EFFICACY. 16

POLICY FORMULATION FOR STATE MANAGEMENT OF PANDEMICS. 16
POLICY FORMULATION.. 17
DESIRABLE END-POINTS. 17
RELEVANT CONSIDERATIONS. 19
RESPONSE TO THE CURRENT BILL. 29

OBIGATION TO IMPROVE, PROMOTE & PROTECT HEALTH.. 30

CONCLUSION: LEGAL IMPLICATIONS. 32

[4] EVIDENCE ON SAFETY IN 2025. 33

Contamination Ignored: Case Study: The NZ EPA’s deficient approach to approving Pfizer’s genetic tech. 38

[5] PSGR RECOMMENDATIONS FOR AN ALLEGED PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCY. 41

APPENDIX. 44

Appendix (i) ORDERS MADE FOLLOWING ROYAL ASSENT OF THE COVID-19 RESPONSE AMENDMENT NO.2 BILL. 44

Appendix (ii) Updated approach to the Sequencing Framework for COVID-19 vaccines. 45

TO READ FULL PSGR SUBMISSION TO THE ROYAL COMMISSION PHASE-2 LESSONS LEARNED

[5] PSGR RECOMMENDATIONS FOR AN ALLEGED PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCY

PSGR understand that the Royal Commissioners have not requested that people send in recommendations. However, if we may, we briefly list below some issues that the Commissioners may consider:

Reinstate: public health ethics and make informed consent non-violable.
Highlight: The illegality of silencing academics and doctors.
Reinstate: Epidemiological understanding of movement, progression, and the decline of an infectious disease and remove pathogenicity (transmissibility) as a main reason for declaration of an emergency event. Instead, an emergency event can be identified from the evidence for hospitalisation and death following infection. This data must be updated on an ongoing basis, using trusted, methods-based conventions to ensure that the data is consistent over time with full recognition that the potential for any infectious disease outbreak to cause death will peak and then decline.
Reinstate: Herd immunity as a key factor in a population reaching immunity from an infectious disease, and require that in any future event that confirmation of natural immunity is central to pandemic response, and that this information is continually and consistently updated.
Recognise that all key goals of the Ministry of Health involve medical drugs or speed of treatment, and that prevention and protection of health through nutrition is a not a high level goal.
Reinstate/reeducate: public law (constitutional and administrative law) education for officials:
1. Good process – transparency, accountability.
2. Relevant considerations – what is a relevant consideration for policy development?
3. Duty to consult - must not be to parties biased to a single intervention.
4. Basis of evidence – the scientific evidence must be systematically updated
5. Bias/impartiality – agencies who sign contracts with corporations should not control funding for science, modelling, data production etc.

Consult with: Philip Joseph, Andrew Butler, Andrew Geddis, Geoffrey Palmer on reinstating public law in government and academia and tightening democratic and constitutional protections for the people of New Zealand.
Revive research in constitutional and administrative law.
Expand: Precautionary principle into general law as per the European Union.
Promote scientific freedom: Pandemic declarations may only be trusted if scientists are independent from political agencies and Ministries. Freedom of scientific enquiry – basic science research must be funded over time so that in an emergency event scientists can research with no concern for scientific freedom and of political or professional licensure.
1. Nutrition and education for public health.
2. Basis of government recommendations must be able to be criticised.
3. Risk from biolabs/gain-of-function.
4. Role of protection of public health – complex disease aetiology.

Understand: freedom for basic scientific research increases our capacity to talk about uncertainty and risk – and identify uncertainty and risk. It supports interconnectivity between scientists and researchers and will support resilience across scientific issues as they arise. This research has been supressed and only narrowly granted to pre-approved projects.[6]
Recommend pathways and funding for: social science, philosophy and public health research so that discussion on ethics, bioethics, freedom, informed consent and so on, may become a part of common lexicon.
Emphasise: The importance of the traditional role of clinical experience in dealing with complex symptom presentation of individual patients. That this is honoured and respected. That education, discussion and collegial professional relations with doctors and public health professionals is nurtured in funded, open conferences and seminars to discuss complex overlapping chronic and communicable presentations and the freedom of treatment options, including nutrition, for experts across all related fields.
Engender a language for reversing disease and biohacking: The practical and ethical questionable response of introducing new drugs to displace the foundational role of the immune system, supporting complex medical/nutritional responses to any infectious disease event. The over-reliance on corporation supplied randomised control trials (RCTs) for drug approvals, and the failure to understand that many treatments are low risk, and therefore do not need an RCT but can be assessed through a weight of evidence in the scientific literature.
- Second line response: Repurposed drugs with a known safety profile
- New, relatively untested drugs/vaccines as a third line position when other treatments have been demonstrated scientifically to be insufficient. That their use be voluntary following fully informed consent and never mandated.
Recognise: That the setting aside of the Bill of Rights was a likely consequence of our long-standing suppression of public good science and enabled officials to narrow their minds to the goal of global vaccine coverage. This also underpinned the conservatism of the courts who were reluctant to weigh the expertise of global scientists outside of the Ministry of Health experts and who were not able to judge the risk from the BNT162b2 intervention for the average healthy person.
Query: New Zealand ratified the ICCPR[7] on 28 December 1978. Did the COVID-19 response comply with the ICCPR obligations and derogations if the direct threat of hospitalisation and death to the people of New Zealand is interpreted as the threat to the nations’ life’, instead of case counts, infectivity and selectively chosen information? Was COVID-19 a demonstrable health threat to the everyday New Zealander from 2020 onwards, or was the justification for lockdowns and mandates based on the infectivity of a coronavirus that primarily targeted the infirm and elderly, much like seasonal influenza?

We thank the Commissioners for this opportunity.

TO READ FULL PSGR SUBMISSION TO THE ROYAL COMMISSION PHASE-2 LESSONS LEARNED

REFERENCES (Introduction).

[1] Health Act 1956 Part 3A Management of infectious diseases. Subpart 1—Overarching principles.

https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1956/0065/latest/DLM305840.html

[2] Shir-Raz, Y., Elisha, E., Martin, B. et al. Censorship and Suppression of Covid-19 Heterodoxy: Tactics and Counter-Tactics. Minerva 61, 407–433 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-022-09479-4

[3] Liester M, Ashraf A, Callisperis P et al (2025). A Narrative Review of the COVID-19 Infodemic and Censorship in Healthcare. Secrecy and Society 3(2). DOI: https://doi.org/10.55917/ 2377-6188.1087

[4] October 11, 2021 Submission COVID-19 Public Health Response Amendment Bill (No 2) https://www.parliament.nz/resource/en-NZ/53SCHE_EVI_115898_HE16756/f803d4311783129cf51351e2593b36a272f11026

[5] See for example: Mabo v The State of Queensland (No 2) (1992) 175 CLR 1. At 203.

[6] PSGR (2025) When powerful agencies hijack democratic systems. Part II: The case of science system reform. Bruning, J.R.. Physicians & Scientists for Global Responsibility New Zealand. April 2025. ISBN 978-1-0670678-1-6

[7] International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/international-covenant-civil-and-political-rights

Download

2025 NZ Royal Commission COVID-19 Lessons Learned

Information

Providing scientific & medical information & analysis in the service of the public's right to be independently informed on issues relating to human & environmental health.