from the Freedom Party
While RNZ appears determined to spend the next 100 days finding new ways to repackage one Winston Peters remark, serious questions are being raised about how the former Labour government handled vaccine-safety information.
Freedom is calling on journalists to question Chris Hipkins about a high-level Vaccine Ministers meeting held on 13 August 2021. According to the Ministry of Health records cited in the statement, the meeting included Hipkins, Jacinda Ardern, Grant Robertson, Andrew Little, Ayesha Verrall and senior health officials.
Yet Freedom claims the meeting is missing from several ministerial diaries, was never formally minuted and produced no surviving notes. It also alleges that Grant Robertson’s diary contained an incorrectly dated and misplaced entry.
Those claims now need to be properly investigated. Missing minutes and diary discrepancies do not automatically prove a conspiracy, but when ministers are discussing vaccine safety and extending vaccination to younger people, inadequate records are unacceptable.
The documentary record confirms that officials were already considering myocarditis and whether increasing the interval between doses could reduce the risk. The Ministry of Health has since published technical material discussing precisely that issue. The Royal Commission also confirmed that New Zealand’s myocarditis safety signal was being investigated months before the August meeting.
The central question is what ministers were told, what they decided and why those discussions were not properly recorded.
Freedom alleges that advice about extended dosing intervals and myocarditis was softened or removed from public communications to maintain “consistent messaging.” It also says Hipkins’ subsequent Cabinet paper omitted any reference to myocarditis.
That does not, by itself, prove Hipkins deliberately concealed the risk. But it certainly justifies hard questioning and the release of the complete documentary trail.
Why was such an important meeting not minuted? Why is it apparently absent from several ministerial diaries? Who decided what safety information would be included in public material? What did Hipkins, Ardern, Little, Verrall and Robertson know, and when did they know it?
Most importantly, were young people and their parents given enough information to provide genuine informed consent?
These questions concern public health, official record-keeping and confidence in government. They are far more consequential than RNZ finding another four people to comment on Winston Peters.
Yet RNZ has seemingly unlimited time for another Peters reaction story while these allegations struggle to receive anything resembling the same attention.
That tells us everything about the media’s priorities. One remark can be flogged for 100 days before an election, but allegations involving ministerial decisions, myocarditis warnings and missing official records apparently do not generate the same urgency.
The media do not have to accept Freedom’s conclusions. Their job is to investigate the evidence, challenge the allegations and put the hard questions directly to Hipkins and the other former ministers.
If the allegations are wrong, establish that with evidence. If they are correct, the public deserves accountability.
Either way, silence is no longer good enough.