A nurse who said in a radio interview that people vaccinated against Covid-19 would not be “100 per cent human” has been suspended for 12 months and censured for spreading misinformation.

The Health Practitioners and Disciplinary Tribunal (HPDT) has found that Sarai Iva Tepou’s actions, including her comments about vaccination being part of a “spiritual war of good versus evil”, were aimed at discouraging vaccination against Covid-19, and amounted to professional misconduct.

The decision comes after a hearing last November on three disciplinary charges laid by the Professional Conduct Committee appointed by the Nursing Council of New Zealand over conduct between April and June 2021, during the Government’s vaccine roll-out.

Tepou did not engage with the committee investigation or the tribunal.

The Auckland nurse was registered in 1991 and later trained as a midwife - the field in which she was practising at the time of the hearing.

The first of the charges she faced related to comments made on Facebook to a group of parents intending to refuse to vaccinate their children against Covid-19.

The specifics were that she posted offensive or inappropriate comments that were derogatory to nurses and other health professionals on her personal Facebook page for the purpose of discouraging vaccination against Covid-19.

Tepou was said to have expressed distrust in her colleagues and encouraged group members to stay away from district health boards.

She has now been suspended over the anti-vaccination comments. Photo / 123RF

The nurse referred to herself and others unvaccinated as the “golden DNA community”.

She also circulated two letter templates in the group, which parents could use to send to a school to refuse their children being vaccinated.

The letters were also shared on her business Facebook page, which could be seen by the public, and likely to bring the health profession into disrepute.

In April 2021 she took part in a lengthy radio interview in English on radio station, PMN Tokelau, about the Covid-19 vaccination roll-out.

PMN Tokelau was for the Tokelauan community, and most of its listeners were middle-aged to older people.

In the interview, she made various claims about the efficacy, safety and underlying agenda of the vaccine roll-out and vaccines generally.

Tepou suggested the vaccine would change the makeup of DNA so that recipients would not be “100 per cent human” and that it was part of a spiritual war of good versus evil.

She claimed that vaccines in general did not have robust safety checks and there was a link between them and autism, that Bill Gates knew the vaccine ingredients and had chosen not to vaccinate his children, and that the Covid-19 vaccine destroyed natural immunity.

A witness who gave evidence to the Professional Conduct Committee talked about the potential impact of the interview including that it had the potential to create confusion in the Tokelau community.

The witness said the community was already at high risk of being confused by different messages on social media about the vaccine.

“Sarai’s interview would have added to the confusion and potentially added to people mistrusting health services. It undermines the efforts of the health system response to the pandemic,” the witness said.

The tribunal found the actions amounted to professional misconduct likely to discredit the nursing profession.

Around June 2021, a worker at Hutt Valley DHB gained access to a closed Facebook group called “School Communities Unite”, made up of parents who were planning to refuse to vaccinate their children against Covid-19.

She then found comments by Tepou stating that she was a nurse and expressed mistrust of her colleagues.

The Hutt Valley DHB worker then found Facebook posts from June 24, 2021, where Tepou had circulated template letters that could be sent to schools by parents, grandparents or students over the age of 16, advising that the students concerned would not be receiving the vaccination.

The letters were also shared on the practitioner’s business Facebook page, called “Pasifika Independent Registered Midwife”.

The next day the worker laid a complaint with the Midwifery Council about Tepou’s Facebook comments and the circulation of the letter templates and said she found the practitioner’s comments to be “highly concerning”.

The Midwifery Council referred the complaint to the Nursing Council.

The tribunal saidthe right to freedom of expression was a factor and ithad to consider the New Zealand Bill of Rights.

However, Tepou’s right to impart information and opinions was subject to the conduct expected of a health practitioner by law, which had a principal purpose to “protect the health and safety of members of the public”.

Regulating the spread of misinformation by a New Zealand health professional to vulnerable communities in the context of a global pandemic was a justified limitation on Tepou’s freedom of expression, the tribunal decided.

It also recommended that Tepou apologise to affected co-workers and ordered that she pay 40 per cent of the costs totalling almost $23,000.

Tracy Neal is a Nelson-based Open Justice reporter at NZME. She was previously RNZ’s regional reporter in Nelson-Marlborough and has covered general news, including court and local government for the Nelson Mail.