New Zealand’s director-general of health Ashley Bloomfield has been impressive during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield at a media briefing at Parliament about the Covid-19 coronavirus. Photo: Pool / NZME
At the beginning of the crisis, he fronted 40 press conferences in two months. It made national news when he took a day off.
He’s sometimes seemed to have encyclopedic knowledge of the country's Covid-19 cases. It’s not unusual to hear him respond in granular detail when asked about an individual infection in Timaru. He will often share data down to the decimal point off the top of his head.
As a result, he’s won plaudits from the media and the public. A song has been written about him. Newsroom’s Anna Rawhiti-Connell has penned a (self-aware) paean to his competence.
Headlines on Ashley Bloomfield's day off Photo: Supplied
But there’s also increasing media resistance to Bloomfield’s deification.
A report today from Newshub’s Michael Morrah found a discrepancy between Bloomfield’s assurance that PPE is not being reused and the actual practices employed in several DHBs.
It revealed that the auditor-general had launched an investigation into how the Ministry of Health has handled PPE distribution during the pandemic.
“Dr Ashley Bloomfield’s comments on PPE have unfortunately been completely contradictory. An investigation is launched as nurses and doctors say they still lack access to PPE, even on some Covid wards. Not good enough,” Morrah wrote on Twitter.
Morrah has been a regular critic of “the Ashley Bloomfield show”. He wrote on April 8 about his difficulties getting information out of the Ministry of Health on PPE supplies, and argued Bloomfield's daily press conferences are not adequate for extracting information.
Those complaints have been echoed by other journalists including The Herald's Kirsty Johnston and Stuff's Thomas Coughlan.
Those failures of communication might not all be Bloomfield’s fault. The government is still considering how to respond to a review of the country's DHB system, which described it as “fragmented, overly complicated and lacking leadership at all levels.”
But as Coughlan wrote yesterday, it’s worth scouring the government’s Covid-19 response for points of weakness, whether they’re structural or with leadership.
Covid-19 is likely to be around for a long time, and the extra scrutiny will help ensure the country is prepared for future outbreaks, he argued.
“While the temptation for triumphal celebration may be strong, we owe it to ourselves to investigate properly just how well our system has functioned.”
Coughlan noted that Bloomfield seems open to that scrutiny, and has himself commissioned several reviews of the Ministry of Health’s performance.
Even if Bloomfield welcomes it, taking aim at his performance holds risks for the media.
Public sentiment appears to be largely positive toward the government and Ministry of Health’s response to the Covid-19 crisis. New Zealand’s case numbers are the envy of the world, and prime minister Jacinda Ardern has featured in a series of glowing profiles in international publications like The Atlantic.
Meanwhile, a negative Facebook post from National leader Simon Bridges attracted thousands of disapproving comments earlier this week, including many expressions of disappointment from people claiming to be National supporters.
Despite that, showing skepticism toward Ardern and Bloomfield also mitigates the media’s risk of looking like they were patsies if future investigations find flaws in New Zealand’s Covid-19 mitigation measures.
It’s instructive to look at the case of Peter Whittall to see the dangers of sycophantic coverage.
The former Pike River mine chief executive won plaudits for his clear, articulate communication in the aftermath of the disaster which killed 29 of his employees in November, 2010.
Herald readers called for him to be named New Zealander of the Year, despite him being Australian. He sat next to prime minister John Key at the national memorial service for the Pike River victims.
It later emerged that Whittall had overseen a negligently run, dangerous work environment in the leadup to the mine explosion.
As Rebecca Macfie’s book Tragedy at Pike River Mine sets out, Pike River was unsafely designed. It didn’t have a second egress, and its ventilation was located inside the mine. Many of its gas sensors didn’t work. The ones that did recorded dangerous methane spikes, many of which weren’t followed up. According to the findings of a Royal Commission of Inquiry, the mine management prioritised profit over safety.
There’s almost no chance that Bloomfield will be found to have failed as badly as Whittall.
But in that saga lies a lesson: it’s risky to canonise someone just because they perform well at a podium in front of the media. Until all the facts are in, skepticism remains warranted.
