28/05/2026
Five years on and still so many questions about COVID vax mandates ..and fairness
WHO DECIDED WHO GOT SAVED AND WHO DIDN'T?
In the Wairarapa, 7 nurses were granted SSD (Significant Service Disruption) exemptions because the DHB said losing them would cause “significant service disruption.”
Yet 2/3 others (dependent on which OIA you read) including an experienced Paediatric Diabetes Clinical Nurse Specialist, were sacked.
There was no cap on SSD exemptions. No rule stopping the DHB from applying for 9/10 instead of 7.
So why were some protected and others discarded?
This wasn’t about safety. It wasn’t about risk. It was discretion, inconsistency, and internal decision‑making, and real people and their patients paid the price.
SSD exemptions were never about safety, they were about pressure. Whilst nurses and others were scrambling to protect their livelihoods, DHB's chose to grant SSD's to those they believed could be pushed into compliance within a short timeframe.
SSD's acted like a temporary holding pen: “We can’t lose you today, but we expect you to fall into line soon.” We hope those who were granted SSD's managed to make it to the end of the mandates - we will however, never know.
Conferring SSD's shows the virus wasn’t the real risk, if it were, unvaccinated nurses wouldn’t have been allowed to work AT ALL, not even for a week. The real priority was maintaining services while still enforcing the mandate. SSDs exposed the contradiction at the heart of the system: if someone was safe enough to work under an SSD, then the risk wasn’t the virus, the risk was losing staff the system depended on.
So the question remains:
Why were 7 considered essential enough to save, while 2/3 equally essential staff were not?
The inconsistency speaks for itself.
Table: Originally posted on X by NZDSOS Feb 2025 - we are trying to source the OIA however the numbers align with what we already know from other OIA's