Do we like Ashley Bloomfield?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Nothing harmful found in his words or acts, a steady record of service, and two small stumbles he corrected and apologised for.
Before the memes, Bloomfield was a public health physician climbing the health bureaucracy. He was running Capital and Coast District Health Board on an acting basis when he was named Director-General of Health in May 2018, and he started the job in June. He was fronting measles and the Whakaari White Island disaster before Covid arrived.
Then came the daily 1pm briefings, and an unlikely folk hero was born. His “no new cases” line was runner-up in Massey University's Quote of the Year, and he was a subject of fan art and memes. He described the briefings as “a performance review at one o'clock every day”, which is a fair way to put it.
He wasn't spotless. In August 2021 he told a parliamentary committee he hadn't discussed a Fijian UN worker's Covid case with Foreign Affairs officials, then corrected himself after it emerged he'd exchanged texts with its Secretary. He apologised and said he hadn't meant to mislead. Radio host Mike Hosking said on air that Bloomfield “lied to the Select Committee”, and the Broadcasting Standards Authority did not uphold a complaint about it.
Earlier that year, in March 2021, he accepted free tickets to a NZ v Australia T20 where NZ Cricket's boss lobbied him on vaccine priority for players. Bloomfield denied making any promises, admitted he should have said no, and donated the tickets' value to the Wellington City Mission. The Public Service Commissioner called that the right thing to do and considered the matter closed. In 2020, National's Simon Bridges accused him of trying to control information flow, and he rejected it in a letter.
On harm, we found nothing. There's no reporting of him attacking LGBTQ+ people, women or migrants, and nothing on climate denial, though the record on those topics is honestly thin. On vaccine mandates he told the NZ Herald he had no regrets, noting that benefits and harms are weighed carefully. That is a public health official defending mainstream public health policy, not someone pushing conspiracies.
The Royal Commission's final report in March 2026 judged the Covid response's decisions and methods “considered and appropriate”, while saying it left scars. It found the late-2021 Auckland lockdown ran six days longer than Bloomfield had recommended. In September, PHF Science, where he has been chief executive since August 2024, began a global hunt for his successor.