March 30, 2026 7:00am by David Farrar

Guest Post: The damning timeline for Hipkins

This is a guest post by a former Ministry of Health staffer:

The NZ Herald has revealed that a Cabinet paper in Chris Hipkins’ name included CV-TAG’s December 2021 advice warning against mandating two vaccine doses for under-18s – advice Hipkins and his colleagues told the Royal Commission they never received. That revelation is damning. But it barely scratches the surface.

The public debate has fixated on whether the December advice reached Ministers. That is the wrong question. The documentary record shows that CV-TAG’s concerns about vaccinating children were communicated months earlier, in August 2021, and that those concerns were comprehensive, specific, and unambiguous.

CV-TAG’s August 4 memo stated plainly that children aged 12 to 15 should be eligible to be vaccinated if they were at high risk of severe outcomes from COVID-19. It recommended explicitly against routine vaccination of that age group, noting that children faced low risk of severe disease or death and that, given New Zealand’s low prevalence of infection at the time, the risk of exposure was minimal. The group flagged that it would revisit the question once more data emerged on the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines in adolescents, particularly the incidence and outcomes of myocarditis cases following the Pfizer vaccine.

CV-TAG’s own minutes confirm this advice was relayed to Director-General Sir Ashley Bloomfield  and “Vaccine Ministers” – at that time Jacinda Ardern, Chris Hipkins and Ayesha Verrall. There is no dispute about this being recorded.

Yet in October 2021, Cabinet decided to include 12 to 15-year-olds in the vaccine mandate framework, requiring two doses for them to be considered fully vaccinated. No further advice from CV-TAG was sought before that decision. The group’s earlier caution about routine vaccination was, by all appearances, simply set aside.

The claim by Hipkins and Verrall that they were unaware of CV-TAG’s position is not credible. Sir Ashley, Dr Caroline McElnay and Dr Ian Town were in frequent, direct contact with Ministers about the vaccine rollout throughout this period. The proposition that all three independently failed to mention the substance of CV-TAG’s advice – that New Zealand’s foremost vaccine experts had recommended against routine vaccination of this age group – defies belief. But even if we accept that improbable scenario, it raises an equally troubling question: how could Ministers decide to mandate a vaccine for children without first requesting and reviewing the expert advice? That is not governance. It is recklessness.

By November, CV-TAG was raising the alarm more explicitly, expressing concern that the mandate required under-18s to have two doses to be considered fully vaccinated. By December 9, the group was effectively pleading for one dose to be sufficient. That December advice – the one the Royal Commission found was never formally delivered – was not a bolt from the blue. It was the culmination of six months of increasingly urgent concern that Ministers either ignored or were never told about. Neither explanation is acceptable.

Sir Ashley Bloomfield bears particular responsibility. As Director-General of Health, his duty was to the public, not to the political imperatives of Ministers. If CV-TAG advised against routine vaccination of children – and the record shows it did – Bloomfield was obligated to ensure that advice reached Cabinet with the weight it deserved. He should have fronted it personally. He should have ensured the public understood the basis on which decisions about their children were being made. Instead, the advice appears to have been absorbed into a system that was more concerned with maintaining the narrative that the vaccine was universally safe than with ensuring informed consent for parents making decisions about their children’s health. Bloomfield’s refusal to answer questions about this matter now only deepens the concern that he served Ministers’ interests ahead of the public’s.

The CV-TAG members themselves must also answer for their silence. When Cabinet included children in the mandate against their explicit advice, where was the public dissent? Where was the letter to the Minister insisting the record be corrected? Their December recommendations for the 5 to 11 age group – which explicitly stated that mandates, vaccine certificates and vaccine targets must not be used for that younger cohort – suggest they understood the consequences of their earlier advice being ignored. The forcefulness of that language reads as an attempt to prevent a repeat. But for the 12 to 15-year-olds, the damage was already done.

More than 300,000 children received two doses of the Pfizer vaccine under this framework. At least one child – a healthy, active 13-year-old boy – died of myocarditis ten days after his second dose. The coroner ruled that the cause of his myocarditis could not be satisfactorily determined, noting that viruses found in his heart tissue could have been responsible but that the vaccine could not be excluded. That finding is technically accurate, but the pathologist noted that had the boy not died ten days after vaccination, the cause of death would have been confidently attributed to viral myocarditis. The system, it seems, could not bring itself to make a definitive finding against the vaccine, even when the alternative explanation required the timing to be dismissed as coincidence.

An unknown number of other children may have suffered subclinical heart damage that will only manifest in the years ahead. What is certain is this: had parents known that the country’s expert vaccine advisory group had recommended against routine vaccination of their children and had not endorsed the two-dose mandate, many would have made a different choice. That information was withheld from them.

The Royal Commission had the opportunity to interrogate this chain of events and chose not to. It did not compel Bloomfield to explain why safety advice was withheld from the public. It did not probe why Ministers proceeded to mandate vaccination for children without current expert endorsement. It accepted at face value the claim that December advice was not delivered, without examining the far more significant August advice that is recorded as having been.

This is not a matter of partisan point-scoring. The question of how a government came to mandate a medical intervention for children against the advice of its own expert group, and how the public was denied the information needed to make informed decisions, is one that transcends politics. It goes to the heart of whether New Zealand’s public health institutions can be trusted to prioritise safety over expedience.

A formal inquiry is now required; one with the power to compel testimony from Bloomfield, Dr Ian Town, CV-TAG members, Hipkins and Verrall. New Zealanders need to understand how Cabinet came to include children in the vaccine mandate against expert safety advice, why that advice was never made public, and what institutional failures allowed it to happen.

The purpose of such an inquiry is not retribution. It is to ensure that the next time a government faces a decision about mandating a medical intervention for children, the expert advice is heard, the public is informed, and the safety of our young people is treated as non-negotiable. New Zealand’s children deserved better. Their parents deserved the truth. It is not too late to demand both.

I have bolded the most compelling parts. The author has also provided the following links to source documents:

Source documents:

As the author has noted, this is a compelling and damning timeline. The experts explicitly recommended against routine vaccination of young New Zealanders, and the Government not only authorised it, but they even mandated it. And it can’t be excused as one missed memo, as there were multiple memos and reports that all warned on this.

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