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’.

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.