Finally, Some Consequences for the MCNZ

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A Necessary Reset: Minister Brown Acts on Medical Council Capture

The news that Health Minister Simeon Brown has declined to reappoint Medical Council Chair Dr Rachelle Love and Deputy Chair Simon Watt is a watershed moment. For those of us who have watched the Medical Council transform from a professional regulator into an ideological enforcer, this decision is a necessary and welcome reset.

NZDSOS has been at the forefront of opposing this lethal drift. In our formal complaint to the Prime Minister on March 9, we detailed how the Council’s draft Statement on Hauora Māori was not about clinical care but about compelling doctors to endorse Critical Race Theory as a professional duty. It required “critical self-reflection” on “privilege” and a commitment to “dismantling unfair systems” – a loyalty test, and hardly a standard of competence.

The response from the New Zealand Resident Doctors’ Association – and other often self-appointed spokespeople for groups they haven’t bothered to survey – claiming this is a “troubling example of political interference” is disingenuous. The Minister appoints Council members and he is demonstrating accountability rather than interference. The Council exists to serve the public, not to advance its own political agenda.

The NZMA Precedent: A Cautionary Tale

This is not the first time a medical body has misjudged the mood of its members and the public. The New Zealand Medical Association (NZMA) formally opposed assisted dying for the 2020 referendum, saying that even if euthanasia were decriminalised, it would “continue to regard it as unethical”. It took this position without conducting a formal vote of its membership. Doctors who disagreed with this stance were left feeling unrepresented, with critics describing the association’s position as “conservative, moralistic, paternalistic”.

The result was an exodus of members. The NZMA’s failure to consult its members on a matter of profound ethical importance – combined with divisions over pandemic responses, which is interesting of itself – contributed directly to its decline. As outgoing chair Alistair Humphrey stated, the association’s finances were “made more and more precarious – which was brought to a head by covid”. Ultimately, in 2022, the NZMA was placed into liquidation after 136 years of largely venerable existence.

The lesson is clear: when a medical body prioritises an institutional position over the ethically grounded views of its members, it risks not only its credibility but its very existence. The Medical Council has been ploughing the same path.

As an aside, some of us who voted for very judicious assisted dying in the referendum of 2020 have since changed our views. We note its timing just as the UK’s covid care home euthanasia scandal emerged, and the rapid slippery slope to worryingly accessible medic-administered death in countries like Canada and Holland. Now we have grave concerns about what it has become. Did anyone foresee that the subsequent rise in all-cause mortality, chronic disability, and unremitting neurological suffering could create an environment where assisted dying becomes not a last resort but a default option?

The Deeper Problem: Joan Simeon Must Also Go

While the removal of Love and Watt – whose particular presence always represented an intolerable conflict – is a victory for common sense, we cannot ignore the elephant in the room: Chief Executive Joan Simeon remains, her hands all over the events from 2021 to the present day.

Simeon is not just the CEO of the Medical Council of New Zealand. Until recently she was the Chair of IAMRA – the International Association of Medical Regulatory Authorities. In February 2024, she signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the World Health Organization, alongside the Federation of State Medical Boards of the US, to create a global framework for medical regulation.

This is the blunt instrument that has been used to enforce uniformity and silence dissent amongst the Anglophone medical community, especially, from the start, perhaps as a test bed for all the others now in the WHO’s clutches. It is the same network that collaborated with the WHO to push through the covid-19 vaccine mandates, attacking doctors who asked legitimate questions about safety and ethics. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus welcomed the agreement, stating it would strengthen “a safe and competent global health workforce”. Competent at what? Pushing pharmaceuticals, of course. For many doctors, this coordinated effort to eliminate professional independence and national sovereignty in healthcare is intolerable.

Joan Simeon’s continued leadership at the MCNZ represents a direct conflict of interest and a credibility gap that cannot be ignored. The same body that she led during the vaccine rollout – which caused profound moral injury to doctors and oversaw the removal of hundreds of practitioners – is now asking the profession to trust it with a new “cultural safety” mandate.

What Must Happen Now

Minister Brown has taken the first crucial step. The next steps must include:

1. The immediate withdrawal of the draft cultural competence and Hauora Māori guidance.

2. A full review of the MCNZ’s leadership and its entanglement with international bodies like IAMRA and WHO.

3. A clear direction to the new leadership that their sole focus must be patient safety – and they could start by acknowledging clear evidence of vaccine harm, though we won’t be holding our breath – ethical competence, and supporting the medical workforce. Ideological conformity and its dangerous proponents must go the way of the dodo.

To the insecure doctors upset by a Minister exerting necessary authority: where were you when previous MCNZ Chair Curtis Walker upended informed consent and safety in pregnancy and children? When he decided a “zero risk product” slogan – reckless endangerment of the people he gave this medical advice to – was the way to advance the Labour government’s obligations to the global pandemic vaccine consortium (and did you know another specialist on the council held the absolutely polar opposite view)? When he enforced mandates that caused moral injury to thousands of doctors and drove many from practice without fair and transparent process? When he is befuddled by the sudden demand for renal dialysis services?

Quoted in the pharma-sponsored trade rag NZ Doctor, Walker lectures us about “evidence-based standards” and warns against “authoritarian” politicians. His hypocrisy is breathtaking. He presided over one of the most draconian periods in New Zealand medical history – and he did it with a smile. His tears now are not for the departed leadership but of anxiety for his own legacy and its likely repercussions.

Yes, Minister

This is about the rule of law, and Minister Brown is absolutely correct. The MCNZ is bound by the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act to uphold medical ethics above all else. It has failed in that duty, and the Minister’s intervention is a lawful and necessary correction.

We will be watching closely to see if the reset is completed. The medical profession, our multi-ethnic community, and those harmed by covid gene products deserve nothing less.