OIA Ministry of Health – Manatū Hauora (the Ministry) on 10 June 2026.

17 June 2026
Tracy Lynch

By email: [email protected]

Ref: H2026084140

Tēnā koe Tracy

Response to your request for official information
Thank you for your request under the Official Information Act 1982 (the Act) to the Ministry of
Health – Manatū Hauora (the Ministry) on 10 June 2026. You requested:

“Please provide:
All internal correspondence, emails, Teams messages, file notes, memos, or
records relating to the processing, scoping, interpretation, consultation, review, approval,
or sign-off of OIA request H2026082615.
 

All records identifying searches undertaken for information within scope of
H2026082615, including:
• search terms used;
• repositories, drives, mailboxes, systems, databases, or folders searched;
• staff, teams, or business units asked to search;
• dates searches were undertaken;
• records of search results, including nil-result searches.

All records explaining or supporting the decision to refuse part of the request under
section 18(d), including records identifying:
• what publicly available material was relied on;
• how the Ministry assessed that the publicly available material answered the request;
• whether the publicly available CV-ISMB Final Report was checked against the specific
requested categories, including trigger sources, assessment notes, escalation records,
meeting minutes/advice papers, outcome decisions, and advice to Ministers, CV TAG,
or programme decision-makers.

All records explaining or supporting the decision to refuse points 3 and 7 under
section 18(g)(i), including records showing:
• how the Ministry determined that it did not hold escalation records;
• how the Ministry determined that it did not hold any SOP, policy, or process document
underlying Medsafe’s Figure 3 “process for investigating a potential COVID-19 vaccine
safety signal”;
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• whether Medsafe, CARM, the Ministry, the CV-ISMB Secretariat, or any relevant
pharmacovigilance staff were consulted before reaching that conclusion;
• whether transfer under section 14 of the Act was considered.

All drafts of the response letter, including tracked changes, comments, legal or
managerial review comments, and approval/sign-off records.

All records identifying the documents attached to the response, including any cover
notes, attachment lists, release schedules, document descriptions, or records explaining
why those documents were selected as responsive.

All records relating to the statement that “knowing which safety signals have been
investigated does not provide useful information to anyone wanting to know the
safety profile of a medicine.” Please include any internal discussion, review, or rationale
for including that statement in the response.

All records relating to the Ministry’s interpretation of my original request, including
any consideration of whether the request sought:
• a list of investigated signals;
• underlying signal-assessment records;
• process/escalation records;
• decision records;
• advice to Ministers, CV TAG, or programme decision-makers.

For clarity, this request is not seeking a duplicate copy of the final response letter or the
attachments already provided, except where those documents contain annotations, drafts,
metadata, release schedules, or internal comments relevant to the handling of
H2026082615.”

Standard procedure for responding to requests under the Act involves consulting relevant
subject matter experts, often across one or more business groups. If section 18(d) is applied,
that means that it was considered that part of your request was adequately addressed by
information in the public domain. As standard practice, we include links to the relevant publicly
available material in the response itself.

If section 18(g)(i) is applied, that means that we:
• Consulted subject matter experts on whether they directly held information or
understood it to be held within the organisation;
• Ran parameter-based searches of the Ministry’s systems, if applicable;
• Consulted other government agencies to establish whether a transfer under section
14(b) of the Act was able to be enacted, if applicable; then
determined the information was not held by the Ministry and was not held by another agency
subject to the Act. The second and third points are unnecessary if subject matter experts can
confirm its non-existence.

Information requested in relation to the handling and processing of your previous request under
reference H2026082615 is enclosed with some information withheld under section 9(2)(a) of the
Act, to protect the privacy of natural persons. The public interest in the release of this
information was considered and not deemed to outweigh the need to withhold it in this case.

Note that this correspondence does not necessarily provide the entire context, as there may
have been further verbal conversations discussing the approach to the response. Subject
matter expertise is one input and is not strictly the final determinant in how a response is
composed.
You have made several recent requests in this vein, in follow up to responses you received.