New Zealand’s hospitals are creaking under the strain of patients suffering respiratory infections. According to Dr Hannah Cooper of PHF Science, a Government health research organisation, “All indicators suggest COVID-19 activity remains very low”. In other words, it’s influenza, rhinoviruses (which don’t come from rhinoceroses) and common colds – not the “deadly virus” COVID - that are causing the surge in winter illness and killing far more New Zealanders than COVID.
This un-COVID sickness surge is entirely predictable. After Omicron became the dominant COVID strain in early 2022, COVID simply stopped posing any significant health risks to healthy people.
Although COVID is over, the effects of Western nations’ political and public health responses to COVID will linger on. One of the only genuine long COVIDs is a pervasive distrust of public health “experts” and politicians. Lies that COVID vaccinations were entirely safe and effective to prevent contraction and transmission of COVID heightened general distrust of vaccinations. This distrust reduced flu vaccination rates, which has significantly exacerbated New Zealand’s current flu surge. It’s no exaggeration to say that New Zealand’s warped response to COVID is now causing manifold flu deaths. Authoritarian lies have unfortunate consequences.
This general distrust of New Zealand institutions and people in positions of authority is only worsening.
King’s Counsel Grant Illingworth chaired the formal Phase Two Inquiry into New Zealand’s response to COVID. Phase Two was ostensibly intended to help restore faith in New Zealand’s institutions and leaders, but has done precisely the opposite.
In March 2026, Illingworth and his fellow Commissioners, Anthony Hill and Judy Kavanagh, delivered their Phase Two report entitled, Whītiki Aotearoa: Further lessons from COVID-19 to prepare Aotearoa New Zealand for a future pandemic. The clue to the merits of Phase Two is of course the double whammy “Aotearoa”.
Grant Illingworth and Anthony Hill are antique lawyers.
Judy Kavanagh’s main claim to infamy is that she was for 10 years a Productivity Commissioner, before the Productivity Commission was abolished in 2024. I’ve previously commented on the mercy killing of the absurdity that the Productivity Commission became under Woke Mess Ganesh Nana:
AXEABLE AGENCIES OF STATE
The Government and main stream media outlets have been doing their best to paint a picture of an economic upswing, just in time for Christmas. But the portrayed rosy economic future is a vision through rose tinted glasses. Inflation is at 3%, the highest it’s been since mid-2024 and unemployment, at 5.3%, is the highest since 2016.
The Phase One COVID Inquiry was a brazen, shameless attempt at a whitewash. In December 2022, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern rubber stamped terms of reference for the Phase One Inquiry that were framed so narrowly as to prevent Phase One from conducting any legitimate investigation of the quality of her Government’s response to COVID.
The Phase Two COVID Inquiry only added insult to injury. Chair Illingworth deliberately avoided exercising the Inquiry’s express powers, under the Inquiries Act 2013, to summons anyone at all to attend the hearing and give evidence in public, on oath (or the secular equivalent, affirmation).
This abrogation of Phase Two’s responsibilities excused Jacinda Ardern, Chris Hipkins, Andrew Little, Grant Robertson and Ayesha Verrall - together with former Director-General of Health, Sir Ashley Bloomfield - from genuine scrutiny and interrogation. Phase Two neglected to require anyone, including any of those central actors in the COVID cosplay, to formally testify.
Ardern, Hipkins, Little, Robertson and Verrall each flatly refused Phase Two’s perfunctory requests to testify on oath at public hearings. There’s no evidence that Bloomfield declined any such request, so most probably the Phase Two Commissioners didn’t even ask the ex-Director-General of Health to testify in a public forum.
If Phase Two had formally summonsed Bloomfield, and put him on oath, he couldn’t – unlike Anthony Fauci, Bloomfield’s US equivalent – have pled “The Fifth Amendment” (the US’s constitutional right to stay silent in order to avoid self-incrimination). He’d’ve had to formally front up.
Nor did the Inquiry at any stage exercise any of its statutory powers to require production of documents or other relevant information.
The indisputable logic is that Phase Two of the COVID Inquiry was also contrived and conducted so as to avoid discovering unpalatable truths and answering hard questions.
This dereliction of duty and failure to exercise the Inquiry’s statutory rights allowed anyone and everyone - no matter how intimate their involvement with the COVID response - to simply choose to avoid participating in the Inquiry. And those who voluntarily chose to talk to the Phase Two COVID Inquiry could say as little as they liked, and lie, with absolute impunity. Without being summonsed to appear on oath, participants in Phase Two avoided exposure to jeopardy for knowingly giving false evidence or withholding information, including any risk of being prosecuted for perjury.
The Phase Two COVID Inquiry’s softly softly tactic of wilful blindness achieved its purpose. New Zealanders learnt nothing new, and their legitimate questions went unanswered.
It became public in February 2022 that a July 2021 memorandum from New Zealand’s COVID-19 Vaccine Technical Advisory Group had advised Bloomfield directly that:
myocarditis and pericarditis (heart conditions) were resulting from Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccinations
international health data indicated heightened heart risks following Pfizer vaccinations
these health risks were higher following a second vaccination, in males and younger age groups
Despite clearly receiving the July 2021 memorandum, in his initial chat with the Phase Two Inquiry Crew on 26 May 2025 Bloomfield avoided acknowledging that continuing to mandate two-dose COVID vaccines for healthy young people after July 2021 had been in any way a mistake.
In his follow-up chat on 11 September 2025, Bloomfield conveniently claimed that his recollection of individual decisions was blurred. The ex-D-G of H deflected by simply and repeatedly referring the Inquiry back to unspecified “briefings”.
A central question that inquisitive individuals such as myself wanted the Phase Two Inquiry to answer was:
When did Bloomfield notify the COVID-era Labour Government of the vaccine heart risks for young people, given he knew about those risks from July 2021 at the latest?
The answer to this question would help reveal the delays between Bloomfield learning of the health risks to young people of COVID vaccination and him informing the Government of those risks, and also between the Government knowing those risks and addressing them.
But the Phase Two Inquiry avoided answering that question. It failed to even acknowledge this crucial question, let alone try to answer it.
Fortunately, thanks to the subsequent earnest journalistic endeavours, we now know the following:
Despite Bloomfield learning definitively of the risks in July 2021, he didn’t formally advise Andrew Little, as Minister of Health, or Hipkins, as Minister for COVID-19 Response, of those risks until December 2021 at the earliest. In that very month the Government decided to continue two-dose vaccine mandates for young people.
Certainly by March 2022, Hipkins knew of the heart risks of COVID vaccinations, as evidenced by a report from him to Cabinet in that month entitled, “Report back on implementation of COVID-19 Pfizer paediatric vaccine for children aged 5 to 11 years”. Despite his evidenced knowledge, Hipkins told the Phase Two Inquiry that he was never – at any damned time - made aware of the vaccine heart risks for young people, and the Phase Two Inquiry falsely found that was indeed the case. AND GET THIS…The Phase Two Inquiry came to that finding despite the Ministry of Health having voluntarily published Hipkins’ March 2022 report in May 2022, on the Ministry’s own public website. The Phase Two Inquiry either missed Hipkins’ March 2022 report or, more likely, chose to ignore it.
The Government pushed out two-dose vaccine mandates for young people for a prolonged period after March 2022, needlessly exposing this vulnerable group to heart risks.
The deep and enduring mystery is why the Labour regime and its health apparatchiks continued to mandate risky double-dose COVID vaccinations for young people well after any possible justification had disappeared. The most generous interpretation is that they were all suffering from the delusion that vaccinated youngsters couldn’t contract COVID or, if they could (of course they could), they couldn’t pass it on to “vulnerable” oldies and fatties.
Whatever the reason for the bizarre COVaxathon of juveniles, it was completely unethical. It’s a flagrant breach of Ethics 101 to force risky medical treatment on people who don’t need it and haven’t given informed consent, even in order to try and protect others.
Everyone’s sick of the effects of COVID; far more than the vast majority of us were ever, or will ever be, sick from the virus.
The laboratory in Wuhan, China where COVID was probably created was doing “gain-of-function” research. Which is a euphemistic way of saying that the mad scientists were - still are - bizarrely trying to create coronaviruses that are more virulent and contagious.
In New Zealand, the China virus’ only gainful function has been to open our eyes even wider to the dishonesty of our power elites and health Tsars, and to be even more suspicious of THE MAN, the Deep State, the Bloberati, official “Inquiries”...
I can’t help wondering if the government’s decision to welcome the parents of migrants is also playing into the spike in numbers. Spend any time at A&E or a medical clinic and you feel like you’re the odd one out. The theory is that the migrants will pay for the healthcare of their parents. Does anyone believe that actually happens? I thought at the time these proposals were aired that they would put a strain on existing services.
The saddest thing is that it is possible at this stage that we could get a government that will feature such people as Hipkins and Verral who were right in the thick of the lies they told about the vaccine that were lies because the vaccine companies had never even tested for the qualities the government boasted about. I sense that many people just hope that the whole thing will go away so that they can forget about it.
Another elephant in the room is the fact as a country we had a pandemic management plan - what happened to that? Why was it never used and why was it never mentioned? Still isn't........