Labour leader Chris Hipkins says his party will not be intimidated by people holding what he calls “anti-science” views after protesters confronted health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall in Wellington. But five years after New Zealand's vaccination mandates, the political use of that label now collides with a more complicated scientific and official record than existed at the height of the pandemic.
eLocal Report: Based on reporting by RNZ Parliamentary Reporters HERE, with additional examination of official New Zealand and international vaccine-safety and effectiveness evidence.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins has vowed that his party will continue campaigning publicly after health spokesperson Dr Ayesha Verrall was confronted by protesters at an event in Wellington.
According to reporting initially published by The Post and subsequently covered by RNZ, Labour volunteers formed a protective barrier around Verrall as protesters challenged her over New Zealand's COVID-19 vaccination programme.
Hipkins told reporters he had spoken with Verrall and took encouragement from the support she received from others attending the meeting.
He said Labour would not stop holding public meetings because of people attempting to disrupt them during the election campaign.
But Hipkins went further, describing some of those challenging Labour's pandemic record as holding strong “anti-science” views which, he said, did not represent the vast majority of New Zealanders.
That choice of language deserves examination.
Protest Is Not Evidence
There is an important distinction to make immediately.
A video described by RNZ reportedly shows Verrall being accused of “mass murdering people”, while police officers were heckled and accused of being in league with “mass murderers”.
Those are extraordinary accusations and should not be treated as established fact simply because somebody shouted them at a political meeting.
Threatening behaviour, intimidation and unsupported allegations against individual politicians cannot substitute for evidence.
But neither does unacceptable behaviour by individual protesters resolve the much larger questions surrounding New Zealand's pandemic response.
It is possible to reject accusations of “mass murder” while still asking whether government claims about vaccination, transmission, safety, mandates and individual risk were always as certain as they were presented.
Those are different questions.
What Does ‘Anti-Science’ Mean in 2026?
During the vaccination campaign, New Zealanders were repeatedly told that vaccination was both safe and effective and was central to protecting not only individuals but other people around them.
That statement contained important truths, but it also compressed a changing and highly conditional evidence base into a simple political message.
COVID vaccines did reduce the risk of infection during earlier stages of the programme, and protection against severe disease was generally more durable than protection against infection. But subsequent evidence demonstrated waning effectiveness and a substantially reduced ability to prevent infection and transmission as variants changed, particularly following the arrival of Omicron. (CDC)
That distinction matters enormously when considering mandates.
A medical intervention that primarily protects the recipient raises a different public-policy question from one that reliably prevents that person transmitting an infection to others.
New Zealand's own Royal Commission of Inquiry into COVID-19 Lessons Learned has subsequently acknowledged precisely that problem.
Royal Commission: Some Mandates Went Too Far
The Royal Commission's assessment provides perhaps the most important context missing from the political shorthand of “anti-science”.
It found that vaccination requirements were initially targeted and introduced with a clear expectation of public-health benefit.
However, it also concluded that some requirements were subsequently applied more broadly than originally envisaged.
More significantly, the Commission found that the justification for vaccine requirements weakened substantially after Omicron became dominant in early 2022 because vaccination had become much less effective at preventing transmission and immunity waned over time.
Its conclusion was that some workplace, occupational and other vaccination requirements were too broad and remained in place for too long, causing harm to individuals and families and contributing to a loss of social trust. (Covid-19 Lessons Learned)
That is not the conclusion of an “anti-vaccine” protest group.
It is the conclusion of New Zealand's official Royal Commission examining the pandemic response.
It therefore becomes increasingly difficult to characterise all criticism of mandates as inherently “anti-science”.
Vaccine Safety Was Never an Absolute
The word safe also deserves more precision than political slogans generally allowed.
No medicine is completely without risk.
New Zealand's own medicine regulator, Medsafe, began investigating myocarditis as a possible adverse reaction to the Pfizer-BioNTech Comirnaty vaccine in June 2021. (Medsafe)
Myocarditis and pericarditis subsequently became recognised rare adverse effects of mRNA COVID-19 vaccination, particularly among adolescent and young adult males. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continues to identify that association in its current safety guidance. (CDC)
By 31 August 2022, New Zealand's Centre for Adverse Reactions Monitoring had received 500 reports of myocarditis, pericarditis or myopericarditis that included evidence of a clinical diagnosis and onset within 30 days of vaccination.
Medsafe was careful to state that such reports did not automatically establish causation and could include coincidental events. That distinction is essential. (Medsafe)
But it is equally important that the safety signal was real enough to require surveillance, public warnings and clinical guidance.
In 2021, New Zealand's independent vaccine safety monitoring board also concluded that myocarditis was probably responsible for the death of one woman and probably related to vaccination, while acknowledging other medical factors may have contributed. (Medsafe)
None of this demonstrates that COVID vaccination was universally dangerous.
It does demonstrate why the phrase “safe” was always necessarily shorthand for a risk-benefit judgement, rather than a literal absence of risk.
Effectiveness Was Also Conditional
The same applies to the word effective.
Effective against what?
Infection? Transmission? Hospitalisation? Intensive care admission? Death? And for how long?
Those questions produce different answers.
CDC surveillance later recorded significant waning of protection against infection, particularly with the emergence of Delta and Omicron, while protection against severe outcomes generally remained stronger. (CDC)
By August 2022, CDC guidance explicitly stated that a primary vaccination series alone offered minimal protection against infection and transmission, while being up to date with vaccination produced only a temporary increase in protection against those outcomes before that protection also waned. (CDC)
That does not mean vaccination had no medical value.
It means the scientific proposition changed depending upon the outcome being discussed, the variant circulating, the time since vaccination and the individual receiving it.
That nuance matters when governments use medical evidence to justify coercive public policy.
Vaccination and Mandates Are Separate Questions
Another distinction frequently lost during the pandemic was the difference between whether vaccination benefited an individual and whether government should compel that individual to receive it.
A vaccine can reduce an elderly person's risk of severe disease without automatically demonstrating that a healthy younger person's employment should depend upon receiving the same intervention.
Likewise, a vaccine can have a favourable population-level risk-benefit profile while still having a different balance of benefits and risks for particular demographic groups.
Those were scientific, ethical and legal questions during the pandemic.
They remain so today.
The Royal Commission's finding that the public-health justification for mandates weakened as protection against transmission declined is therefore particularly relevant when Hipkins now dismisses some critics with the broad term “anti-science”. (Covid-19 Lessons Learned)
Labour Cannot Separate Itself From the Mandate Era
This is also not an abstract discussion for the Labour Party.
Labour governed New Zealand throughout the period in which vaccine certificates and vaccination requirements were introduced across significant areas of employment and public life.
People lost jobs or faced exclusion from workplaces and activities because they would not comply with vaccination requirements.
For those affected, the issue was not simply whether they personally approved or disapproved of vaccines.
It concerned bodily autonomy, employment, informed consent, proportionality and whether government possessed sufficient evidence to justify coercion.
Years later, New Zealand's own Royal Commission has acknowledged that at least some of those requirements were broader and persisted longer than they should have.
That finding belongs in any serious discussion of Labour's pandemic legacy.
The Unanswered Health Questions
There are also continuing public concerns about post-pandemic patterns in mortality, fertility, cancer diagnoses and reproductive outcomes.
Those subjects deserve investigation, but they also require discipline.
Changes occurring after vaccination do not by themselves demonstrate that vaccination caused them. Population ageing, COVID infection itself, delayed diagnosis, disrupted healthcare, migration, economic conditions and pre-existing demographic trends can all affect population statistics.
Likewise, terms such as “turbo cancer” do not represent a formally defined diagnostic category, making claims difficult to test unless they are translated into measurable questions about particular cancer types, age groups, incidence rates and stages at diagnosis.
But saying causation has not been established is very different from saying questions should not be asked.
New Zealand possesses extensive national health data.
If concerns exist about all-cause mortality, cancer incidence, fertility, miscarriages, stillbirths or particular adverse events, the scientifically appropriate response is transparent analysis using age-standardised data and, where ethically and legally possible, anonymised linkage to vaccination status, vaccine product, dose number and timing.
That is science.
Calling everyone asking such questions “anti-science” is not.
Science Requires the Freedom to Challenge Science
Science does not work through political declarations of certainty.
It works through hypotheses, data, replication, criticism and revision.
An assertion accepted in 2021 may be modified by evidence collected in 2022, challenged by another study in 2023 and refined again as longer-term data become available.
That does not mean science failed.
That is how science is supposed to work.
The political problem arises when governments take an evolving scientific assessment, convert it into an absolute public message and then characterise disagreement with that message as opposition to science itself.
The subsequent record of waning protection, recognised adverse effects and New Zealand's own Royal Commission findings demonstrates why that distinction matters.
Hipkins Has Every Right to Reject Intimidation
Hipkins is on solid ground when he says politicians should be free to meet the public without intimidation.
Verrall should be able to speak at a political meeting without being threatened or subjected to unsupported accusations of murder.
Police officers should not be abused for maintaining public order.
There should be no ambiguity about that.
But political accountability works both ways.
A politician's right to reject intimidation does not create a corresponding right to dismiss legitimate questions about government policy by assigning critics a pejorative label.
Labour made some of the most consequential public-health decisions in modern New Zealand history.
Those decisions deserve continued scrutiny.
Does This Affect New Zealand?
It could hardly affect New Zealand more directly.
The pandemic response changed employment relationships, restricted movement and access to public life, affected businesses and families and created divisions that remain visible years later.
The Royal Commission has already concluded that some vaccine requirements went too far and lasted too long.
Official regulators have acknowledged genuine vaccine adverse effects.
International evidence has established that protection against infection and transmission was substantially less durable than early political messaging often suggested.
At the same time, evidence continues to support a protective effect against severe COVID outcomes, particularly for higher-risk groups. (CDC)
That is precisely why this cannot responsibly be reduced to “pro-vaccine” versus “anti-vaccine”, or “science” versus “anti-science”.
The evidence is more complicated.
Chris Hipkins is entitled to condemn unacceptable behaviour towards his MPs.
But as the leader of the party that governed during New Zealand's vaccination and mandate programme, he should also be prepared to answer criticism of those policies without assuming that questioning them places somebody outside the boundaries of legitimate scientific debate.
Five years after New Zealanders were asked to place extraordinary trust in government, the appropriate response to unresolved questions is not less scrutiny.
It is more evidence, more transparency and more accountability.
Source: RNZ Parliamentary Reporters, 9 September 2026 — Labour's Chris Hipkins says his party won't be intimidated by 'anti-science'
Additional sources: New Zealand Royal Commission of Inquiry into COVID-19 Lessons Learned; Medsafe; US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Independent reporting. Original context. Credited sources.