Why boosters were never added to domestic vaccine passes

When boosters started to ramp up in early 2022 - adding them to the domestic vaccine pass was publicly talked about by then Prime Minister Ardern - yet they were never added, why not?

I’ve covered domestic vaccine passes in detail as I found their usage 1 of the most troubling of the many Covid restrictions.

Work on them had been on-going since very late 2020, but had been focused on supporting New Zealanders to be able to travel, as it was expected people would need to show vaccination evidence for several years. While many other countries had already introduced them, there was no firm discussion of domestic vaccine passes in documents until August 2021 as the general rollout was starting.

When the confirmed usage was finally announced, it was just 17 days before they became mandatory in early December 2021, and the legislation was done under urgency with no attempt at giving time for public consultation or submission.

Cabinet also went further than the offical advice to just use them at large summer events - instead they were mandated for all close contact businesses (gyms, hairdressers, cafes and libraries etc) to events and entering office buildings.

When I originally went through the available documents, the rationale for them was sometimes vague, was it to reduce transmission or nudge younger people towards vaccination?

Justification after the fact is always the most convenient kind - in which case their use became solely to reduce transmission.

Their introduction also coincided with the start of the 1st booster campaign starting.

By February 2022 the recommended time between getting the 2 dose primary series and then the 1st booster had shortened from 6 to 4 to finally 3 months.

And with it came calls for adding boosters to vaccine passes - and it seemed like a real possibility. In January 2022 then Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told a press conference adding a booster to the pass to keep them valid was an option she was open to. In early February 2022, then Covid Minister Chris Hipkins said it was likely boosters would be required to maintain the pass.

International travellers & boosters

An issue that was extensively reviewed by officials was the ability for people arriving in New Zealand to access boosters to enter if they became required (at the time people had to show evidence of vaccination on arrival).

Because boosters were variably available by country it posed operational challenges. In January the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC) had provided advice on whether all international travellers should have a booster to enter:

Yup, Minister Hipkins suggested tourists could be monitored and required to get a booster within a certain timeframe after entering New Zealand.

But if a non-citizen managed to board a plane - they could not be forced to be vaccinated under the Bill of Rights. But because the Covid legislation over-rode that same Bill of Rights - it was fine for New Zealander’s to be mandated under it.

It’s sad to reflect that technically non-citizens had more rights in New Zealand than people who lived here.

The purpose of domestic vaccine passes

There is absolutely no evidence that is referenced within the mid-February briefing on the implications of adding boosters to passes to Minister Hipkins, or that I have found through my document trawling, for this above statement that vaccine passes actually did prevent the spread of Covid. It’s conjecture.

At the time this briefing was being written - New Zealand’s Covid rates were starting their rise to be 1 of the highest transmission rates in the world. Much like masks - which were claimed to be actually reducing transmission without any attempt to confirm that assumption - I suspect the same is true here.

The purpose of boosters was to:

But there was no evidence that boosters would affect transmission now that Omicron was the dominant strain and people were catching it in droves:

The Ministry of Health advice, through the Covid Vaccination Technical Advisory Group (CV-TAG) went on to conclude within the briefing:

When mandates (the Vaccination Orders) were initially assessed, Ministry of Justice officials came to the conclusion that the public health benefit had to be wider than to the individual to justify mandates.

Yet if reduction in transmission was the original rationale for the passes - Medsafe, the regulatory agency, discussed in documents in February of 2021 that the Pfizer vaccination did not have strong evidence that it reduced transmission.

Yet somehow that thinking spread everywhere despite the facts - by a July 2021 update to Minister Hipkins - a section titled ‘what does the science say?’ confidently stated that breakthrough infections would only occur in less than 0.5% of vaccinated people.

I think this belief was due to a mix of hubris and hope (in New Zealand and overseas) that vaccination would largely end the pandemic.

In hindsight, hope is all the Ministry of Health’s science updates (frequently based on small, observational studies) seemed designed to confirm.

And hope is blind to reality - especially the evidence of other highly vaccinated countries who still continued to have waves of infection. Vaccination was seen as the only possible avenue to pursue so the justification for vaccination marched stoically behind it.

Booster doses & the under 18s

Repeatedly, and I mean repeatedly, through their minutes the Covid vaccination group recommended that under 18s only require 1 dose for the purposes of any vaccine mandates, including domestic vaccine passes.

When this advice was ignored they issued a strongly worded memo to then Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield reiterating this recommendation just after domestic vaccine passes were implemented. Their advice went unheeded, and 2 doses were required to get a valid domestic vaccine pass by anyone over 12 years and 3 months. A decision that was neither rational based on the risk and benefits of vaccination to that age group, nor ethical.

Once school’s re-started the following year, this raised several operational problems as while schools were prohibited from asking students for the passes - after school activities were asking for them and excluding students if they couldn’t show a pass.

DPMC even gave Minister Hipkins an out for this problem in February 2022. But he didn’t bite and chose to not did not go with the recommended option to simply not require domestic vaccine passes for under 18s.

However booster doses weren’t approved for use in the under 18s by Medsafe at the time this briefing was written.

So if boosters were added to passes, there would need to be different requirements for those under 18 vs those over 18.

Operational issues of requiring boosters

By the time of the booster briefing the Ministry of Health had already begun work on adding a booster dose to domestic passes. They also noted they thought that passes should only be accepted with identity checks!

Another issue was equity, although incredibly adding boosters to passes was seen as a way to increase equity:

The 1st paragraph doesn’t make much sense, the 2nd is irrelevant as the briefing has already concluded that the booster wouldn’t affect transmission (and I’ll add younger people were at vanishingly small risk of poor Covid outcomes) and the last paragraph just shows how incredibly disconnected the people who write these documents are from the implications of their policy.

Why boosters weren’t added

The booster briefing is dated 17th of February - right in the middle of the protest at Parliament against mandates:

The above is about the only mention of the impacts of passes on people throughout the document - the increasing protests and push back are not mentioned at all.

And this is likely the key clue as to why boosters were not added to passes - but also why they ended up being dropped in early April 2022.

I’ll cover the work DPMC did on their reviews which led to their dropping in a future post.