Health Minister David Clark has brutally thrown Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield under the bus while standing right next to him, after the Government’s quarantine testing botch-up.
Dr Clark pointed blame at the Director-General as they stood next to each other in Wellington on Wednesday.
Newshub’s footage captured Dr Bloomfield’s face after Dr Clark told reporters, “The Director-General has accepted that the protocol wasn’t being followed. He has accepted responsibility for that.”
Newshub asked the Health Minister why he won’t take some of the responsibility.
“The Director-General has already acknowledged that the system didn’t deliver here.”
Dr Clark shouldn’t be so quick to lay blame.
If Dr Bloomfield hadn’t been forced to step up as a de facto Health Minister during the COVID-19 response because Dr Clark was AWOL, perhaps Dr Bloomfield would’ve been able to focus on his actual job – running the operational side of things.
National’s health spokesperson Michael Woodhouse suggested there has been a breakdown in the relationship between Dr Clark and Dr Bloomfield.
“We’ve seen from the body language over the last couple of weeks that the relationship between the Minister of Health and the Director-General has deteriorated.”
But Dr Bloomfield has denied that’s the case.
From Checkpoint on RNZ:
Clark is not smart enough to distance himself as much as possible from this as his Prime Minister seems to have done. Seems to be pass the parcel from the top down.
This just in:
Your NZ 
Blazer
/ 24th June 2020Clark is running out of..’lives’.
Bloomfield is the goodie’ in the eyes of the public,no contest.
Kitty Catkin
/ 25th June 2020Hardly now with untested and infectious people walking away from isolation and all the stuff-ups that are being revealed every day.
As we were all locked up for two months because of the supposed dangers of Covid, this does not look good. If it was as little risk as it’s now made out to be, why were we all in HD?
Pete George
/ 24th June 2020Minister versus Minister:
This is getting chaotic and brutal,
Garry George
/ 24th June 2020The press and National are relentlessly gunning for Clark, the weaker point. They won’t be happy until they have broken him, for their own reasons.
John J Harrison
/ 24th June 2020Utterly disgraceful and beneath contemptible from Clark.
The fact that he is a Dr of religion may explain his contemptuous attitude.
Geoffrey
/ 24th June 2020Clark is already broken. He has not done the job to which he was appointed and has behaved appallingly as a man. It is a serious indictment of our electoral system that this total twat ever got into office, is still in office and is still drawing a ministerial salary.
Fight4nz
/ 24th June 2020Agreed. But there was Key and now Trump. Democracy not short of pitfalls.
Gezza
/ 25th June 2020Curious that Jack Tame & the other media jounos are attacking David Clark for throwing Bloomfield under the bus – taking credit for the operational successes but blaming him for the operational failures – when Ardern clearly set the game plan there.
She’s done the exact same thing. The Jacinda & Ashley show stopped immediately. Suddenly he was someone she pretended to defend for a few days but didn’t want to be seen with. Kindness got chucked out the window.
Gezza
/ 25th June 2020Greg Presland (MICKEYSAVAGE) writing in The Standard on Monday:
https://thestandard.org.nz/in-defence-of-ashley-bloomfield/
Blazer
/ 25th June 2020Presland’s post is measured and reasonable.
Be interesting to see how the public react to Nationals orchestrated campaign of negativity come polling day.
Kitty Catkin
/ 25th June 2020Do you think that letting people go out into the community untested for the disease that closed us down and resulted in paranoia (80, 000 deaths !!!!) and, in two cases, people going out with covid which was mistaken for asthma, is a positive thing?
We were all in imminent danger from C19 in the lockdown, now the danger is slight despite the potential number of people with it being out there. They can’t both be true.
Jack Marrow
/ 9th July 2020What do you guys think, was it too early for the nation to totally lift the restrictions?
Blazer
/ 10th July 2020More to the point …tell us what YOU…think.
Jack Marrow
/ 10th July 2020It was too early, they could have at least observed 15 days more, or gradually take the restrictions to see if it is really worth getting thing back to normal as usual.