Former University of Otago vice chancellor and government vaccine task force epidemiologist Prof David Murdoch and former New Zealand director-general of health Sir Ashley Bloomfield have made claims in today’s New Zealand Medical Journal (NZMJ) that there was a sense of "collective global amnesia" about the Covid-19 pandemic, leaving investment in pandemic prevention, preparedness and response "nowhere near the scale or speed necessary".
Prof Murdoch told the Otago Daily Times he was not surprised no-one was prioritising it.
"This is something that has happened before after a major event.
"If you look at New Zealand’s situation at the moment, there’s so much happening — the financial pressures, the restructure of health, all these other things going on — you can easily see how you could get distracted.
"The best time to plan for a pandemic is when the last one is still fresh in our minds.
"There’s already concerns about highly pathogenic avian influenza and monkey pox — they really highlight that we just need to get on with it."
He highlighted Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora statistics which showed as of October 14, the number of New Zealanders who had died with Covid-19 had reached 6837 since the pandemic began.
On October 14 alone, six people died with the virus — three of them were from the southern region.
Despite repeated warnings from experts, numerous initiatives and the direct, lived experience of a major pandemic, Prof Murdoch and Sir Ashley told NZMJ that the level of activity now did not match what was required to mitigate the widespread health, social and economic impacts of the next "inevitable" pandemic.
New Zealand’s pandemic planning would need continuous updating to evolve, the duo said.
New Zealand had to avoid reliance on an influenza-centric pandemic plan — which was one of the earliest key lessons learned from Covid-19, they said.
It quickly became apparent in early 2020 that Covid-19 was not behaving like seasonal influenza and that "a significant shift in strategy was required", making it clear that pandemic planning had to incorporate the ability to "adapt to the specific characteristics of the pathogen at hand".
Future pandemics needed to be considered primarily a security threat, rather than a health threat, and in future should be led by the Department of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, to ensure responses were instantly able to address threats to economic and social wellbeing, as well as public health, they said.
They also stressed the importance of clear leadership and decision-making structures, writing that it became clear early on in New Zealand that leadership structures envisioned in planning frameworks needed to be re-thought to quickly respond to the evolving situation and emergence of elimination as the overall strategy.
"Rapid, highly co-ordinated cross-government leadership and decision-making were needed.
"The complexity of the situation meant that no pre-existing framework could fully account for the range of challenges the pandemic threw up."
They also called for pandemic planning processes to be regularly tested to evaluate the core "pillars" of a response against a range of different pathogens, with the national pandemic plan updated at least annually, tested in six-monthly exercises and made easily accessible to stakeholders, including government officials, frontline health workers and communities.
New Zealand needed to ensure it had the infrastructure necessary to underpin and support its future pandemic preparedness — not only at healthcare level, but in supply chain and logistics, communication technology, financial systems, community services and education, they said.
