Al
Al writes a substack based on OIAs and proactive releases looking back at the history of the New Zealand Covid response.
A video of current Prime Minister Chris Hipkins in a press conference has been doing the rounds for pulling a Trudeau, where he claims there was no compulsory vaccination.
In September 2020, then Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern stated she did not see any need for penalties or sanctions. Presumably that meant mandates or other restrictions such as the domestic vaccine pass.
All of which they implemented.
All of these were based on 2 doses as a minimum, regardless of someone’s age – which was despite the vaccination advisory group advice to the contrary. And even when Chris Hipkins in his role as Covid-19 Response Minister was given an out to exempt children – he didn’t take it.
While there have now been a few cases in the media of people who have successfully been able to legally challenge their dismissal, how many people were terminated (I prefer the word fired so I use the terms interchangeably) or had their working life otherwise affected is incredibly hard to know.
Stats NZ were asked how many people left their place of work due to vaccination-related termination, but they responded there was no way to know as the data collected was broad in nature and could be because a business closed due to lockdowns.
Being fired was the worst-case scenario. You might have similar stories, but I know people who found other jobs before they were inevitably fired or were instead made to work from home when work place policy became a de facto mandate and barred people.
In February 2022, news media reported a total of 2,600 people were stood down due to government mandates, including 1,461 people in health care services.
Those numbers are really hard to accurately verify as since that was reported, there have been OIA’s with differing numbers. For instance, according to the Nurses Professional Association of New Zealand (NPANZ), 621 nurses left in December 2021 from just the main public health system Te Whatu Ora/Health NZ, and a total of 1,500 staff had been terminated in total to June 2022 (boosters were added to the health care staff mandate in early 2022).
For government agencies, the State Services Commission instructed each agency to to conduct a health and safety risk assessment to figure out if they required vaccination. Thanks to some dedicated requestors, here’s a collection of publicly available OIA’s I’ve come across:
This Ministry of Social Development OIA from March 2022 discusses their policies and the fact that government agencies could not require people to show a vaccine pass when visiting their services. Ironic.
However, a later OIA shows that 220 people were sent a preliminary notification of decision letter that they could be terminated. The Ministry of Social Development initially refused to answer how many were terminated in OIA requests, but a more recent request saw they actually terminated no one, as yet another OIA shows they instead adopted an “encourage but not require” Covid vaccination policy.
Inland Revenue did not fire anyone but did require 120 staff to work from home while the vaccination policy was in place.
At Corrections, 80 people were fired with the status recorded that it was due to vaccination status.
At Oranga Tamariki, 17 people were fired due to vaccination status.
The Ministry of Justice claimed no staff were fired over a policy requiring vaccination in their workplaces including courts, but doesn’t address other measures, like requiring unvaccinated people to work from home.
The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment also claimed no staff were fired due to their vaccination policy, however, 2 staff went on extended leave and like the others, the OIA didn’t address if staff were required to work from home.
The New Zealand Defence Force fell under a mandate and they extended it to include civilian staff. An initial briefing said 200 uniformed staff declined to be vaccinated. A news media article from 2022, when the mandate was challenged in court, states 120 uniformed staff had been stood down.
Police also fell under a mandate and at the time of the February 2022 High Court ruling against the mandates, publicly said they had issued 42 termination notices and a further 100 staff had quit or taken leave due to the mandate.
Teachers fell under the mandate too (not all education staff fell under it).
The Ministry of Education in a 2022 OIA they said they didn’t record information on why teachers might have left but did introduce a “Covid” reason category in November 2021 that showed 447 teachers had left. This 2023 OIA asks the same question and gets the response that 42 teachers were terminated.
(And while I was looking up these OIA’s – this May 2023 OIA shows the Ministry of Education still has 29 million adult and child-sized masks in storage – and that’s out of the 72 million they originally purchased!)