Covid-19 NZ: Who is who in the Government’s Covid-19 response team – Stuff.co.nz

If you just watch the press conferences, the team making the Covid-19 decisions can seem very small.

The Prime Minister. The Director-General of Health. Various other ministers and health officials on the off days.

In reality, while the biggest calls are often made by a very select group, there is a small army of people who are key to the national Covid-19 response, both in the Beehive and a few hundred metres down the road at the Ministry of Health.

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Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern makes the calls, ultimately.

This one will hardly surprise you. Ardern is not simply the messenger of a response dreamt up elsewhere: She is generally the one with the final call on big decisions. Her Cabinet colleagues technically make these decisions collectively but generally what the prime minister says goes.

She also plays an important role communicating these decisions to the public. Even if journalists often tire of her long introductions to alert change decisions, they are probably the most-watched bits of television she ever gets, and are generally designed to make whatever change is announced seem inevitable based on the evidence.

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Raj Nahna with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in Paris.

Nahna and Donald lead one of the four different offices that technically serve the prime minister the Prime Ministers Office PMO). This office differs from the much larger Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC) in that it is nakedly political, while DPMC is full of career bureaucrats who stay on between regimes.

That doesnt mean the PMO is just focused on beating National or anything. It is more that it serves to fulfil the goals of this specific Labour Government, rather than governments in general. That can mean policy advice, comms advice and sometimes just co-ordination of the masses of information and people that could feed into decision-making by the prime minister.

Nahna has been in the role since May 2019 but has a much longer history with the Labour Party, as well as experience working for Chapman Tripp and the Obama campaign in 2008.

Donald was pinched by the prime minister from a role at the Green Party, where she had a long career. Prior to her current role she was the prime ministers chief policy adviser. She is daughter of the late Rod Donald.

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Jacinda Ardern with her chief press secretary, Andrew Campbell.

Campbell has held the role for several years now after being poached from the Green Party. He likes to say Ardern just writes her speeches herself but he is undoubtedly a key figure in shaping Covid-19 communications, as well as managing relationships with the press gallery (Us!).

As chief press secretary Campbell is ultimately responsible for all the messaging that goes out from Ardern to the media, from one-line responses to questions, to full press packs detailing complicated news, to organising the 1pm press conferences. He and his team also have some level of oversight over all the press secretaries for various ministers, and he has general visibility over the extremely wide swath of the Governments communications, even if he technically is not responsible for something that say, the Ministry of Health puts out.

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Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins, right.

Hipkins is the Minister for the Covid-19 Response, meaning he has political control of all the day-to-day Covid-19 stuff not big enough to cross Arderns desk, from managed isolation to smaller vaccine decisions to testing.

Hipkins has worked with Ardern for close to two decades as they both were staffers in the Helen Clark Government. His office also has a team of advisers and press secretaries who do a lot of the day-to-day interfacing with the sprawling health service, in particular advisers Alex Marett and Morehu Rei. Hipkins inherited Rei when he took over the role from David Clark and brought Marett with him. Hipkins has two press secretaries but much of the Covid-19 press is handled by Richard Trow, who has worked in various communications roles since leaving The Dominion Post in the early 2000s.

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Associate Health Minister Dr Ayesha Verrall.

Verrall was elected to Parliament in 2020 and rocketed straight to Cabinet. She is now a crucial voice around the table on Covid-19 matters.

Prior to Parliament, Verrall was an infectious diseases doctor and a (Labour-aligned) member of the Capital and Coast DHB. Early on in the pandemic she was a key public voice, criticising the Governments contact tracing capacity in an audit completed for the Ministry of Health.

Abigail Dougherty

Dame Juliet Gerrard is the PMs chief science adviser.

Science-based policy advice is hard. Lots of scientific questions are not all that settled. And things that can make perfect sense scientifically might make absolutely no sense politically.

Worse, some of the top people advising the prime minister on science-based issues will have competing interests. Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield has an interest in making the public health service look good for example. This does not mean anything he says would be wrong, per se, but it means having another voice in the room can be useful which is why the prime minister has an independent chief science adviser.

Gerrard began in this role in 2018 and is often in the Beehive. Her background is in protein biochemistry but as a professor at the University of Auckland she also possesses a skill not always present in scientists a clear ability to explain complex topics well. The Ministry of Health have their own chief science adviser who performs a similar role Ian Town.

KEVIN STENT

Dr Ashley Bloomfield on his way to Parliament, about 800 metres away from the Ministry of Health.

While the virus may have made Bloomfield one of the most recognisable names in the country, he has actually been the head of the nations health system since 2018.

He is the head of the Ministry of Health, which is itself not a particularly large organisation. However, the ministry has general oversight over the 20 district health boards that run all our hospitals and other public healthcare.

This makes him the face of the healthcare system, particularly at those 1pm pressers. Bloomfield was always better at this kind of public accountability than his predecessor, Chai Chuah, but has become better and better at the public-facing part of the role as the pandemic has continued.

One of his key roles is providing advice to the prime minister and Cabinet on various health decisions, taking into account both his own expertise and what he knows the health system can actually deliver. This does not mean his advice is always followed: Early on in the pandemic Bloomfield pushed for all travel into New Zealand to be halted including for returning citizens.

Bloomfield started his career as a public health clinician, after qualifying in medicine at the University of Auckland in 1990. He has a particular professional interest in non-communicable disease prevention things like diabetes and other chronic conditions and he spent 2011 at the World Health Organisation in Geneva working on this topic.

Before moving to the ministry, he was Hutt Valley District Health Board chief executive between 2015 and 2018. Prior to that, he held a number of senior leadership roles within the Ministry of Health.

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Dr Caroline McElnay is the main person the Ministry of Health puts up instead of Dr Ashley Bloomfield.

McElnay is a more unassuming face of the response, showing up on the days Bloomfield doesnt, but is an important public servant. As the director of public health she has a particular focus on big society-wide interventions (like lockdowns or fluoride) rather than the pointy end of surgeries and emergency rooms. This makes her well-suited for Covid-19, where the aim of the game is to keep people out of hospital.

Originally from Ireland, she has decades worth of experience in public health. She studied medicine at Queens University in Belfast and public health at Manchester University before emigrating to New Zealand and settling in Hawkes Bay, according to The Irish Times which profiled her last year.

Gibbs is directing the Covid-19 vaccine programme across the country. She comes from Auckland DHB where she has worked for six years and before that Britains sprawling National Health Service. Also key to the vaccine programme is operations manager Astrid Koornneef who managed contact tracing prior to this, and has a long career in both the Ministry of Health and various DHBs.

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Bridget White, right, appearing before a select committee in her role for the GCSB.

Also at the Ministry of Health is White, who is the acting head of Covid-19 health response. She is a deputy chief executive, so one level down from Bloomfield, and far less visible but much more involved in the day-to-day. White has a long career in the public sector more broadly, most recently at one of the Governments spy agencies.

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Head of MIQ Megan Main on her way into the Beehive theatrette with Chris Hipkins.

Main is a deputy chief executive at the sprawling Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), which is responsible for the managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) system a role the agency took on more because of operational capacity than any real remit.

This is a thankless task. On one side you have thousands of people wanting MIQs booking system to work better, to allow people from all over the world to come here for work or family. On the other hand the current outbreak, and several other leakages, look to have come from some kind of MIQ-leakage. Main has a long career in the public sector, including in Victorias health service.

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Covid-19 NZ: Who is who in the Government's Covid-19 response team - Stuff.co.nz