Guest Post: Covid-19 meetings without minutes
A reader writes in:
I read your article on the Royal Commission finding the disturbing part is this is 7 months before!
We have caught the previous executive out on demonstrable untruths regarding a critical timeline, and have formally escalated complaints to both the Chief Archivist and the Public Service Commission (at the explicit suggestion of the Ombudsman investigator who is also investigating refused documents ).
The core of the issue centers on a high-level meeting involving the Prime Minister and senior Cabinet ministers on Friday, 13 August 2021 to decide on the youth vaccine rollout and the intentional removal of safety data from public communications.
Here is the hard data and the paper trail we have uncovered:
- The Verified Attendance List: Ministry of Health OIA response (Ref: H2026082262) explicitly confirms that Chair Chris Hipkins, PM Jacinda Ardern, Grant Robertson, Andrew Little, Dr. Ayesha Verrall, Aupito William Sio, and Peeni Henare all attended this Zoom meeting.
- The Diary Omissions & Physical Alteration: Despite official confirmation that this high-stakes meeting occurred, it is entirely missing from the proactive monthly diaries of Ardern, Hipkins, and Little. More egregiously, in Deputy PM Grant Robertson’s official diary, the “1” was stripped off the front of the “13” (rendering it a single digit), causing the entry to sit completely out of chronological sequence on the page to effectively bury it.
- The Admission of No Minutes: In the same OIA response, the Ministry of Health officially admits that this high-stakes meeting—where core executive ministers made pivotal decisions—was completely unminuted, and no official notes exist.
- The Smoking Gun on Data Removal: Real-time operational papers place Chief Science Advisor Ian Town directly at the meeting with a 7-point clinical briefing paper. Three days later, a Cabinet paper signed by Hipkins completely scrubbed any reference to myocarditis risks in young people. This matches the official CV TAG Minutes from 17 August 2021 (chaired by Town), which state in black and white under Section 6.0: “It was requested that references to increasing dosing intervals potentially providing some protection against myocarditis be removed from communications. This has been actioned.”
This is a fundamental breach of Section 17 of the Public Records Act 2005, which mandates a strict statutory duty to maintain a full, accurate, and uncorrupted chronological ledger of executive action. When official ministerial records can be quietly scrubbed, physically manipulated, or left entirely unminuted to bypass OIA and Ombudsman oversight, it sets a dangerous precedent for public service accountability. regardless of who is in power.
Also worthy to note is the sanitisation of the Jan 16th cabinet meeting. You can see from the cabinet paper signed by Hipkins after the 13th and before the 16th, that any references to the dosage intervals reducing risk of Myocarditis in 12 to 15 years old is sanitised from the papers to the rest of the cabinet. So they kept their own cabinet in the dark AND the public