Table of Contents
The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Covid-19 Lessons Learned has released its Phase 2 report.
Royal-Commission-Covid-19-Lessons-Learned-Ph2-Main-Report Download
To the thousands of New Zealanders who gave their testimony to this inquiry, who shared their stories of loss, injury, and hardship at real personal cost, we want to acknowledge you first. Whatever this report says, your evidence is real, your experiences are real, and they are not going away.
The report runs to over 700 pages. We will review it carefully and share detailed analysis in the coming days and weeks. We are relieved it is out of the way.
Those who expected little from this process were not wrong to do so. And yet, on first reading, at least the commission has acknowledged several things New Zealanders and NZDSOS have been raising for years: that restrictions continued longer than public health advice recommended, that Auckland’s lockdown extended beyond what officials advised was necessary, and that the government’s own expert advisors concluded the two-dose vaccine mandate for 12- to 17-year-olds was not justified due to myocarditis risks – yet that advice was never passed to the ministers responsible, and the mandate remained in place. That last finding warrants careful scrutiny, and we will have more to say about it once we have worked through the full report.
What the report does not provide is accountability. It documents failures without naming those responsible and recommends improvements without proposing consequences for past decisions. The tens of thousands of New Zealanders who gave their testimony to this inquiry, who trusted that their stories would be taken seriously, deserved more than this.
The report takes swipes at the likes of us too, claiming it is disinformation that damages community cohesion. But we rather thought that dying needlessly was pretty disruptive too.
In many respects, this report is largely irrelevant to what we know needs to happen next. The evidence still exists, someone is still responsible for the deaths and injuries that occurred, and the next theatre, the general election, is eight months away. We will continue to pursue every possible avenue to truth and accountability.
Read our evidence and more: nzdsos.com/covid-inquiry-evidence-hub
This article was originally published by the New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out With Science.
