Tony Blakely, Chair of the RCOI into Covid Speaks with Mike Hosking (8 Feb 2024)

A few notable quotes from Blakely:

"Vaccine efficacy is a very wide area. This is just my view as one citizen, is that it wouldn't be a good use of our time to go and review the international literature and work out exactly what the vaccine effectiveness was."

'There are other issues about vaccines, for example vaccine harms and things like that, which I think, personally, as just one expert here, are probably beyond what a Royal Commission should do, that can be done by others. But let's see what comes in on the engagement with the New Zealand public."

"It's actually up to the New Zealand Public to come in with what their views are. We live in a democracy, so what's going to happen is we'll be collecting all those views on our terms of reference, on behalf of the New Zealand government. We then forward that data on to the Department of Internal Affairs, they analyse it, give it to Minister Brooke van Velden in April or May. She then sits down with the rest of the government cabinet and they decide how they want to tweak our terms of reference. It's their call."

"We have been charged with doing the Inquiry in a non-adversarial way, so we speak to a lot of people and ask them to be free and frank, and we protect their confidentiality. The British and the Scottish are doing it in an adversarial way, where you have the lawyers in the room and it's cross examination, all the rest of it. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, at the moment though, our Inquiry is doing it in a non-adversarial way."