Monkey Business

QU ONE: LOOKING BACK
My father died on 15 March 2020 of a heart attack. He lived in the UK and my mum phoned at midnight to tell me he was lying dead on the kitchen floor. What should she do? Could I come over? I said yes, of course.

It soon became apparent, however, that if I flew to England there was no way of knowing when I would be able to return. A pandemic had just been announced by the WHO and travel restrictions were starting to be put into place on the 16th. Could I leave my wife and children alone for who knew how long, and take the risk of flying into an epicentre? I decided to stay in Aotearoa and look after my family. Luckily my brother also lives in the UK and was able to help my mother navigate the autopsy, cremation and managing the financial affairs in the bureaucratic chaos that the UK was becoming.

That was very hard for us all. It was 3 years later that I was able to see my mother and visit my father’s grave.

Many people suffered as a result of the pandemic, many far worse than me. But no one is to blame. Well perhaps we all are. There are too many people on the planet and maybe nature is trying to bring us back into balance. In any case, in humanitarian terms our government’s response was largely the right one, and many thousands of people are still alive because as a nation we chose to follow the science and the evidence we had at the time. It angers me that some people would try to belittle that, or deny that covid was real or as serious as it was. I recall following the John Hopkins University website and watching the numbers of fatalities tracking up. I read up as much as a lay person can reasonably expect to about the efficacy of the vaccines and the value of lockdowns. As someone who is instinctively sceptical about vaccines, it became obvious to me that the vaccine saved lives. Yes being vaccinated carried risk. Like all medication, some people suffered side effects. But the evidence was clear that the risks from not being vaccinated were far greater. I think NZ was very lucky to have leaders who made good decisions on our behalf. Other countries with poor leadership suffered great loss of life compared to us.

Not every decision was perfect. I think the way lockdown was imposed placed real hardship on small businesses and advantaged large corporations. I think the way subsidy money was handled was open to abuse and again the money disproportionately went to the wealthiest corporations. The economic impact could have been more equitably handled. We could have used it as an opportunity to bolster local self reliance rather than more dependence on long supply chains. We could have used it to promote health and well-being alongside vaccinations messaging instead of allowing it to be seen as an either/or. We could have done more to promote equitable access to essential medicines on a global scale. Lost opportunities.

Also some of the communications were poorly messaged. While the regular updates were great at keeping people informed, phrases like ‘single source of truth’ and ‘social distancing’ (as opposed to the more accurate ‘physical distancing’) were not helpful. The government could have done more in countering misinformation.

Having said that, it was hard to predict the sheer craziness that would erupt, fuelled by international money funding local grifters. That they managed to pull in so many well-meaning people who had justifiable questions about the impacts of the policies is an indictment on Government communications. That some became cult followers living in an information bubble and disbelieving anything that contradicted their viewpoint is a tragedy.

I am a decision-maker in a large organisation. We introduced a vaccine mandate for all staff who interface with the public. We lost people over it and were heavily criticised by a small number in the community. Front line staff faced verbal and physical abuse because of those decisions, although we did our best to maintain services for all, vaccinated and unvaccinated alike. It was a difficult decision but I have no regrets about the stance that we took. Our priority was to safeguard the health and well-being of our staff and our community. Most people in our community understood why we took the position we did and supported us. People absolutely have a right to choose whether or not to receive a vaccine, or any other medical treatment. They do not have a right to put others at risk. Choices have consequences – not as a punishment, but in terms of minimising the potential impacts on others.
The lesson for me in that is that it is easy to read too much into the strongly held opinions of a small number of people. Their concerns shouldn’t be ignored, we should learn from them, but we shouldn’t over-react or think they represent the views of most people. This inquiry will no doubt hear lots of submissions from militant anti-vaxxers. Some of those will misrepresent what happened, deny the scientific evidence, and fabricate events, either deliberately or simply because they truly believe things that are false. For example I had a friend who I trust tell me that their partner had adverse effects from the vaccination. The partner denied it when asked, and from their story it seemed like it was an exaggeration of events. I do not think they meant to lie, but that their perceptions were so biased as to mislead them.
So it is up to you, the commissioners, to look honestly, soberly and robustly at the evidence and provide some impartial answers to people’s many questions. No doubt whatever you say, you will be criticised and attacked. I encourage you to pay no attention to that and just present your views as honestly and impartially as you can. Thank you.

QU TWO: LOOKING FORWARD
As I mentioned in the first question, I think the things we need to learn are:
1. To think holistically and in an integrated way. For example, how can we use an emergency such as a pandemic, and its recovery, to achieve multiple social-economic aims such as boosting local economic self-reliance and circular economies, encouraging individual health and well-being alongside pharmaceutical interventions, looking after our most economically vulnerable instead to defaulting to throwing money at the wealthy.
2. I would like to see us do more as a national to support the freeing up of pharmaceutical IP rights to allow more equitable access to essential medicines such as vaccines across the globe. Too often NZ seems to take a position on the world stage of bolstering corporate rights over the rights of people to access medicine, and the common wealth of the body of scientific knowledge.

3. We need to be better prepared to counter misinformation by global actors driven by ideology rather than by scientific evidence.