Verrall was born in Invercargill to Lathee and Bill Verrall. She was raised in Te Anau. Her mother was born in the Maldives and was the first Maldivian to pass Cambridge examinations in English and study in New Zealand on a Colombo Plan scholarship.[4][5] Verrall is named after her grandmother, who died when Lathee was two years old.[3] In 1997, she was a member of the New Zealand Youth Parliament, selected to represent Clutha-Southland MP Bill English.[6]
Before entering national politics, Verrall was a senior lecturer at the University of Otago in the Department of Pathology and Molecular Medicine. She taught microbiology to medical students and researched tuberculosis epidemiology, immunology, and host-pathogen interactions.[10] She was also an infectious diseases physician at the Capital and Coast District Health Board in Wellington and became an elected member of its board in the 2019 local elections. She stood representing the Labour Party and was appointed as the board's deputy chair.[14][15]
During the 2019–2020 New Zealand measles outbreak, Verrall advocated for a more strategic approach to allocating government resources to increase vaccination rates for measles and prevent future outbreaks.[16]
In March 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Verrall called for the government to urgently improve its data on the community spread of COVID-19 by expanding the testing criteria beyond sick people and increasing laboratory testing and contact tracing capabilities to reach 1000 people per day. At the time, contact tracing was only carried out for 50 cases per day.[17][18] Subsequently, Verrall was commissioned by the ministry to provide an independent audit of its contact tracing program.[19][20] Her report was submitted in early April and made public on 20 April.[21][22] It concluded that although the quality of contact tracing was good, the health sector was "understaffed and lacked cohesion," relied on slow, manual processes and hard to scale up.[3][23][24] The ministry accepted Verrall's recommendations.[22][25] In June 2020, Verrall was invited by the World Health Organization to share her audit report as an example of best practice.[26][27]
The Labour Party announced its list candidates for the October 2020 general election on 15 June. Verrall was ranked 17th as a list-only candidate, the highest-ranked newcomer, positioned behind Cabinet ministers and the Speaker but ahead of other sitting MPs.[28][29][30] With that winnable position, she was immediately identified as a future health minister (David Clark, who had held that office since 2017, had been recently demoted amid several scandals).[31] Verrall said the COVID-19 pandemic was her "push" to move from academia and medicine into politics.[30] Her election as a list MP was confirmed in November and she gave her maiden statement in Parliament on 8 December 2020.[32][33]
As Associate Minister of Health, Verrall unveiled the Government's new Smokefree 2025 plan in early December 2021. As part of the plan, the Government introduced legislation banning anyone under the age of 14 from legally purchasing tobacco for the rest of their lives. Older generations would only be permitted to buy tobacco products with very low-levels of nicotine while fewer shops will be allowed to sell tobacco products.[38][39] The law changes, passed in 2022,[40] were reversed by the Sixth National Government in 2024 before they came into effect.[41]
In a June 2022 reshuffle, Verrall was reappointed as Minister for Seniors and Associate Minister of Health and newly appointed as Minister for COVID-19 Response and Minister for Research, Science and Innovation.[42] Another reshuffle, in February 2023, saw her promoted to be Minister of Health, retaining the research, science and innovation portfolio.[43][44] In a retrospective interview in 2025, Verrall said her priorities as Minister of Health had been "workforce, wait lists and winter."[45]
Opposition
During the 2023 New Zealand general election held on 14 October, Verrall was re-elected to Parliament on the Labour Party list.[46] Labour lost the election and in late November 2023 Verrall assumed the health, public service and Wellington issues shadow portfolios in the Shadow Cabinet of Chris Hipkins.[47]
On 5 December 2023, Verrall was granted retention of the title The Honourable, in recognition of her term as a member of the Executive Council.[48]
As Labour's health spokesperson, Verrall was critical of the appointment of Health New Zealand commissioner Lester Levy and his financial management of the public health service.[49][50]
In a shadow cabinet reshuffle in early March 2025, Verrall lost her public service portfolio but retained the health and Wellington issues portfolios.[51]
The Verrall Award, granted by the New Zealand Medical Student Journal, is named after her, to honour her efforts to form and secure funding for the journal in 2003.[52][8]
Personal life
Verrall has one daughter with her partner Alice.[3] Maldivian politician Mohamed Nasheed is her cousin.[53]
^Welasari, Welasari; Suwaryo, Utang; Agustino, Leo; Sulaeman, Affan (27 March 2020). "Recruitment and Selection of Head Department (In West Java Province's Government of Indonesia)". International Conference on Social Sciences. The International Institute of Knowledge Management. pp. 11–20. doi:10.17501/2357268x.2019.6102. ISBN978-955-3605-36-8.
