I read that apparently the Government are about to give a formal response this month to the Covid Inquiry Phase Two report.

Brooke van Velden, who drove it, was so concerned about the mistake made around Covid vaccine advice for 12–17-year-olds, and the fact Chris Hipkins said he didn’t see any advice, when in fact he did.

She went off to seek advice as to what to do.

They told her what you would expect they would, which was, roughly, you could do a lot, do a bit, or do nothing.

The trouble with Royal Commissions is once they are done, they are done, and launching yet another inquiry, she rightly decided, would be wasting everyone's time.

So she has passed it off to the Health Minister, and we stand by.

The tricky thing here is accountability: will there ever be any?

Hipkins and Bloomfield, the two critical players here, never turned up in person to the Commission. Once the mistake was discovered, that the paperwork on the vaccine did get to Hipkins in Cabinet, no one seems to want to know anything about it.

The head of the inquiry, Grant Illingworth KC, doesn’t answer questions. "The report can speak for itself," he tells everyone. Hipkins relied on the faulty report to say he never saw anything, even though he did, and Bloomfield refuses all comment.

I go back to my original request; that the Government do things properly, which was an adversarial inquiry i.e. they had the power to force people to turn up. Because when they don’t and the Q&A is all back and forward on paper, look what happens.

And what does happen? Well, nothing, clearly.

I'm happy to be proven wrong, but what is the Health Minister going to do? What happens to Hipkins or Bloomfield, apart from nothing?

Mistakes were made in Covid, so we have two Commissions. Commission one is a whitewash, Commission two missed critical detail, so more mistakes are made.

Does that give you confidence that the next time we have an epidemic we are any better off?

Of course not.

So as we await the so-called response, what was the point?

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