The government will investigate the effects of some of the most drastic measures during the corona pandemic. Minister Ernst Kuipers (Public Health, D66) said this in the House of Representatives on Thursday. There was a debate about the second investigation report of the Dutch Safety Board (OVV) about the approach to the corona crisis.
“Measures are always related to mutual interaction, timing and context,” said Kuipers. “That does not relieve me of the obligation to find out what the effectiveness was.” The House of Representatives has been calling for a new, extensive investigation into the recommendations in the OVV report for some time now. So far, the cabinet did not want that, but now it changed tack.
Read more about the second OVV report here: Effect of corona measures ‘not or hardly monitored’ and strong criticism of OMT; the most important conclusions from the OVV report
In that report, which was published in October 2022, the OVV recommended that measures such as the closure of schools, the mask obligation and the curfew be investigated separately. “Too little is known about the desired and undesired effects of measures,” the OVV concluded at the time. New studies, carried out by the scientific partnership ZonMw and RIVM, should help the cabinet to make better decisions about the use of certain measures in the event of future new pandemics or virus outbreaks.
A majority in the House of Representatives, including the coalition parties VVD, D66 and CDA, and opposition parties PVV, GroenLinks, PvdA, SP and SGP, demanded a new investigation on Thursday. In this way, new outbreaks can be tackled more effectively, but also better support for possible future measures can be created in society, argued several MPs.