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• Published date: 20 August 2023
• Publication title: Herald on Sunday

“The comment I would like to make,” he says, with such a striking tone and familiarity that I instantly picture him at the Beehive Theatrette podium, “is of the many thousands of people who have come up to me — and it’s an everyday thing — only one has been slightly unpleasant.”

What on earth happened, I ask him over lunch.

“The comment was ‘Are you Ashley Bloomfield? Well, I hope you have a terrible day because you’re a terrible man.’”

If you’ve had the misfortune of tumbling into the cesspit of social media comments — and indeed, even some of the commentary in mainstream media — you’d regard this a lightweight criticism compared to the vitriol from the keyboard warriors.

Every single person, apart from that one, has been civil and thankful in the real world, says Bloomfield, the former director general of health who led New Zealand’s charge against Covid.

“I know there are people out there that personally don’t like me or think I was acting in a political way. I was bothered by some of what my family got to see but I never took it personally. I didn’t fear for my safety.”

It’s just over a year since Bloomfield, 57, quit as health boss.

The relief of vacating the role was virtually instant, he says. Sleep patterns have returned. His wife Libby says he looks five years younger. She and the couple’s three young adult children now have their husband and father back. Bloomfield says he has brain space back.

“You can never switch off,” he says of the role, for which he fronted most of the 1pm Covid press conferences, usually alongside Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. His face launched a thousand social media memes, adorned tea towels and, yes, features in many New Zealanders’ mobile phone camera rolls.

“The analogy I use is the Covid pandemic was like a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle,” says Bloomfield. “But we didn’t have the picture on the front of the box. We had to assemble this puzzle bit by bit as new information came in. And every now and then we’d realise we had pieces in the wrong place, and we had to swap out.

“I was carrying that puzzle in my head the whole time and every single little bit of it and the connections between it.

“And as soon as I did finish up, I realised I don’t need to have that in my head anymore. It felt like I had my brain back to do other things.”

There is a common theory among critics that the Government became captured by Bloomfield and his team at the Ministry of Health, to the extent that immediate health considerations — preventing deaths — ruled out all other factors in our Covid response, including the impact on businesses, the economy, family relationships, workers’ lives and livelihoods and longer-term health impacts such as mental health and wellbeing. “Our response was by no means perfect,” says Bloomfield, “but comparatively it is one of the best in the world.”

He has no overall regrets — it’s a question he’s asked a lot. Two weeks ago he was in front of the Royal Commission of Inquiry for the first time.

“I don’t have regrets because ... what’s the big picture here? What are the key things we are trying to achieve — protecting people, our vulnerable groups, protecting our healthcare system, stopping the virus getting into the Pacific.

“And of course, it’s debatable but also, I think we did our best to protect New Zealand’s economy at a time of huge uncertainty. It’s the adage — we live life forwards, but we only understand it looking backwards.”

No regrets then about the length of time we were in lockdown or the time it took for the elimination strategy to be lifted: “I think we got it about right. By the time Omicron came to New Zealand in early 2022, only last year, we were down to five cases of Delta. So we had essentially achieved what we set out to achieve, which was to eliminate that outbreak.”

Nor regrets on the mandates, which led to some people losing their jobs: “No one wanted that to happen, but the benefits and risks and harms of any decision are always weighed up carefully. We certainly weighed them up in our advice and I know Cabinet and the Government as decision makers weighed them up incredibly carefully.”

Perhaps a small regret is that we weren’t more precautionary about masks earlier on.

He wants to put to bed any idea that he was alone in guiding Government. The Prime Minister and Cabinet, he says, were never just receiving advice from the Ministry of Health. They were receiving a wide range of views across portfolios — “even on the health side there was solicited and plenty of unsolicited advice — of course, some of it through the...