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.
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.
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.
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.
Every article i can find discusses New Zealand having the longest-running and toughest covid restrictions in the world, pretty far from normal life. I remember them briefly easing restrictions in 2020, and it was widely celebrated as some kind of victory over covid, but it was short lived, and restrictions and mandates came right back stronger than ever.
Well you’ve been reading incorrect.
I live in NZ and was here all through covid. We had, outside Auckland, a total of 8 weeks lockdown, then some mild restrictions for a few weeks, then business as usual.
Places like Melbourne and the UK had over a year of restrictions and many more months of lockdown
Public masking and vaccine mandates didn’t stop until September 2022.
That’s different from a lockdown, no?
You clearly do not live in Auckland then. The person you’re replying to is not incorrect, you were just fortunate to live in another part of the country.
I know Auckland lockdowns were longer and more difficult. But they are incorrect. They weren’t “the worst in the world”. Melbourne had the longest lockdowns in the world.
Auckland had an extra 3-4 months than the rest of the country (for a total of about 6, but Melbourne had basically 9 months.
The “one town” you’re referring to is Auckland, NZ’s economic center and has a third of the country’s population.
Whenever I talk about COVID lockdown with NZers from outside of Auckland they play it down because there was only a few weeks of strict lockdown at the start. However, anyone that lived in the Auckland region can tell you that the lockdowns were long, tough and plentiful. People in Auckland were still stuck in their homes celebrating birthdays alone late 2021. Eventually the government gave up when the Omicron variant exploded and a majority had been vaccinated.
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.
Our restrictions were basically lifted after four weeks in 2020 because that was enough to eliminate the virus. I think going a bit authoritarian with the lockdown maximised our freedom in the long run that year.
Yikes. Do vaccines reduce the likelihood of getting Long Covid?
Yes… Vaccines reduce the risk of more serious Covid infections, which is linked to Long Covid.
I think it reduces both infection and severity, from what I remember.
By contrast USA had over 600,000 preventable deaths due to their utter lack of response… So is this what you would have preferred???
“Grandma and Grandpa have to die for the economy.” -Texas
Yeah, probably the same Texans who were shouting about death panels and “don’t pull the plug on Grandma” when Obama tried to fix healthcare.
Nevermind the vaccines were giving 20 year old healthy men heart attacks. And for what? The literature regarding the vaccines stated they didn’t prevent the spread, they just reduced the symptoms. So Grandma and Grandpa got COVID anyway.
I feel that this is when social media really showed how much harm it could do to spread misinformation. Good on NZ.
Information on all sides was described as misinformation.
Reasonable is great when it comes to this kind of thing.
"And I encourage it to be released soon … the next pandemic may not be far away. We need to get on and prepare.”
Yeah, it’ll probably come from the US due to some vaccines becoming illegal in some States. Let’s just hope it doesnt spread through mouth rain like covid does.
Excuse me… “mouth rain”?
Sneezes, I believe, specifically the spittle of a sneeze.
“Those who think that Dr Blakely is a patsy for the previous government … you’ll get a huge surprise when you open that report,” he told NZ media outlet Stuff.
Can someone translate this to English?
“Dr. Blakeley is not a patsy for the previous government, according to that report”, would be my guess?
Pasty (noun) pale, sticky liquid
Ohhhh, sorry! A patsy (watch the spelling!) is someone who takes the fall for, or is otherwise manipulated by someone else.
Patsy not pasty
Mmm… pastry…
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.
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.
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.
Ah, another “trust me, bro” response with no actual evidence. Cool.
I lived through it.
Yes, again, “trust me, bro” is not evidence.
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.
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.
In another words, it hurt their poor little feelings
In Chapter 8, the report goes on to talk about how hurting their poor little feelings debased the authority of the government and the authors offer suggestions on how to do mandates better during the next pandemic.
This seems to assume there was a response by the center-left government that could both be pro-social and would not be attacked by conservative douchebags. They’re not going to be impressed by a finely threaded needle, they’ll just up their ask, because reducing the popularity of their opponents is the point of conservative propaganda, not the actual policy.
The report is worth a read: https://www.covid19lessons.royalcommission.nz/reports-lessons-learned/main-report/
Chapter 8 is 81 pages long, if there’s a point you think is particularly insightful in dealing with conservative grievance and propaganda, you’ll need to be more specific.
Good job on trying, but it seems like there’s little room for nuanced debate here because “antivaxer stupid”
I’m also assuming a lot of people here don’t realise Auckland spent four months locked in their houses while they threatened to keep us there forever unless the entire fucking country had 90 percent vaccination rates… and they pursued the mandates even at those high vaccination rates. Against the MoH advice…
My wife is a therapist and she is still dealing with the fallout of those lockdowns.
Most places had some type of shelter in place orders for a period of time that was difficult for people to handle. I never thought your comment was anti-vax.
Here’s the thing, it was a global pandemic, any decision a government made was only going to mitigate disaster, not prevent it entirely. Either a lot of people died or a lot of people had a really difficult time. I tend to think preventing deaths comes first. If your argument is NZ wasn’t flawless in their handling of the pandemic response, sure, no one was. But they did a better job than almost any other country. Zero countries had a satisfied populous after the pandemic. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. You’ll learn from it and hopefully do even better next time.
Here’s some perspective, in the US we had more people die in the pandemic than any other single event in American history. More than WWII, more than the Spanish flu, more than the civil war, etc. The damage to our psyche from all that death, far exceeds 4 months in lockdowns and vaccine mandates. Over 1 million dead here, be grateful your country at least sought to keep you alive.
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’ve investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing.
More like we followed facts, science, and common sense, and found no wrongdoing. We also now have examples for how to do better mext time.
Is this the non-evil version of “We investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong?”
Well, in the sense that they found that they did do many things wrong in hindsight but that the overall concept was not wrong… no?
In this thread, many people making judgements based on incorrect facts and ignoring that New Zealand’s biggest city had about a years worth of strict lockdown over the 2 year period from 2020-2021. In this thread you’ll also find New Zealanders from outside of Auckland commenting about their personal experience on behalf of everyone from the country.
