Shaun Hendy's warning: The Covid lessons we're still to learn

NZ Herald

13-05-2025

Scientists, eh? Where would we be without them. They're not gods, just human beings who might make mistakes but have useful information to tell us.
Hendy's information, now and for the last few years, has been extremely useful. He kept a diary through those years and The Covid Response is the result: a compulsively readable page-turner, meticulously annotated and full of insights and provocations about the pandemic and his role in it.
Off the bat, let me say I'm chairing a session with Hendy in the Auckland Writers Festival this Sunday. We'll be joined by Kimiora Raerino and Lavinia McGee-Repia, editor and contributor, respectively, to Toutū Ngā Marae, a new collection of beautiful and sometimes challenging stories about the way marae all over Tāmaki Makaurau responded to the pandemic.
Hendy is a physicist, not a microbiologist like Siouxsie Wiles or a public-health specialist like Michael Baker. So how did he even fit in?
'In my job as a lecturer at the University of Auckland,' he writes, 'I taught a short course every year on the mathematics of networks ... I had become interested in applying the mathematics that physicists use to other types of problems.'
That led him into economics, social science and even efforts to eradicate Mycoplasma bovis from our livestock. 'Pandemics were now my kind of problem.'
In 2013 he founded the research centre Te Pūnaha Matatini. It does modelling. Hendy's thing is numbers.
Not everyone, you may remember, was impressed by Covid modelling. 'Predictions' that tens of thousands of us would die from this or that outbreak strained credulity for some people. Hendy reports Mike Hosking on NewstalkZB told Chris Hipkins, then the Minister of Health: 'How about you give me one million [dollars], I'll model for you.'
But Hendy has a weather analogy to respond to this, involving not shoes but umbrellas.
'If you take your umbrella, the sun will shine,' he writes. 'If you leave it behind, it will rain. It's funny because we all know it's not really true, but imagine the plight of a weather forecaster if they were asked to predict not just the weather but how many people would get wet. Forecast some rain, the umbrellas come out and, hey presto – no one gets soaked.'
The job of Hendy's team was to show what would probably happen if everyone had an umbrella. That is, if we stayed home. He makes the point many times that modellers don't produce 'predictions'. They analyse 'scenarios': what might happen if we do A instead of B?
New Zealand's pandemic successes were not evidence the modellers were wrong. They suggest they were right: the lockdowns and other measures worked.
Who can forget what happened in Italy and New York, where the disease was upon them before effective public health measures were in place? Bodies piled into refrigerator trucks outside hospitals.
Science is a form of organised scepticism, said the philosopher of science Robert Merton. Hendy quotes him approvingly.
And scientists aren't oracles who reveal 'the truth'. But they do know, or are supposed to know, how to think about information.
Some of them, like Hendy, Wiles and Baker, know how to talk about it too. Hendy did a thousand media interviews in the pandemic's first 18 months.
It got to him, as it got to everyone. After the first lockdown, he writes, the first time we eliminated the virus, 'I cried quietly with relief. Jacinda Ardern's 'Team of Five Million' had done it.' Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Professor Shaun Hendy, via audio-visual link, give a Covid-19 update at Parliament on September 23, 2021. Photo / Mark Mitchell
As we know, not everything went so well. Science might be organised scepticism, but politics can be organised failure.
By late 2020, new variants were arriving and lockdowns were back, but it was clear vaccines would be available. Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield recommended to Cabinet that Māori and Pasifika aged 50 and over should be at the head of the queue. He also wanted lockdown restrictions not to be lifted until 90% of Māori were vaccinated.
Others, including the Māori Council, were saying the same.
The reason was simple enough. While pandemic deaths in the general population were more common among the elderly, Covid was killing Māori and Pasifika at much higher rates than others and that was largely because the age curve started younger.
But Cabinet, 'worried about a racist reaction from the wider public', as Hendy puts it, rejected Bloomfield's advice.
Then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern wrote to the Māori Council, telling them that setting vaccination targets for Māori before relaxing restrictions could create 'a perception amongst some, that that group is preventing the country from opening up more quickly'.
'This fear of a racist backlash had real consequences,' writes Hendy. He quotes research suggesting that if Māori vaccination rates had been the same as Pākehā rates in the 18 months from January 2021, 'between 30 and 80 Māori lives would have been saved and 500 to 1000 hospitalisations avoided'.
It's a bitter irony that the last and longest lockdown in 2021 could have been shorter if Bloomfield's advice had been accepted and, therefore, vaccination rates were much higher in South Auckland.
Hendy is proud of what we got right.
'We had designed and deployed lockdowns, becoming one of the few countries in the world to eliminate Sars-Cov-2. We had built a state-of-the-art genomic surveillance system that allowed us to hunt down chains of infection with a precision that other countries could only dream of. We had developed a vaccination system that could deliver millions of doses a month across the country.'
All of which produced 'one of the lowest health burdens, one of the highest vaccine coverages, and one of the most favourable economic outcomes for any advanced economy'.
And a rate of excess deaths 10 times lower than Britain and the US. After the first three years, Britain had recorded 223,778 Covid deaths: a rate of 3.2 per thousand. In America 1,135,343 people had died of Covid: 3.4 in every thousand.
If we'd had the same rate here, we'd have had 17,000 to 18,000 Covid deaths. The actual number at the same three-year mark was 2662, or 0.5 deaths per thousand people.
One way to read this is that Britain under Boris Johnson, the jovial charmer who toured here in December, recorded 200,000 needless deaths.
The lessons? Hendy thinks the courage to go hard has to be matched by the courage to be flexible. 'Mandates,' he says, 'gave the appearance of certainty in what remained a highly uncertain environment, but once Omicron arrived they immediately lost a good deal of their effectiveness.'
He wants a New Zealand Centre for Disease Control, to coordinate forward planning and responses.
He thinks there's 'no doubt that some funding should have been devolved to Māori experts or providers', not only in healthcare – as did eventually happen during the vaccine rollout – but also in science.
'When Māori communities were empowered during the pandemic, the results were impressive. [The Royal Commision] found that 'more iwi and Māori involvement in the early phases of the Covid-19 response would have resulted in better outcomes for Māori'.'
And, Hendy says, there's the lack of funding. Te Pūnaha Matatini won the Prime Minister's Science Prize in 2020, but the work it was doing then is 'currently not being maintained for the next pandemic'.
It barely was even then. 'When I first briefed the Prime Minister in June 2021 on how [the Covid strain] Delta was going to affect New Zealand's exit from elimination, I had to finish by begging for an extension of our funding, which had run out several weeks earlier.'
There's another challenge. 'A good rule of thumb for decision makers in the next pandemic,' Hendy writes, 'is that the narrower and more targeted the measure, the less likely it will be effective when deployed in an uncertain environment.'
All very well, but what will we do if the next pandemic arrives and there is no social licence for a lockdown? Is that where we are now?