Yeah I was kind of mentioning this stuff more because one day your parents will get old.
Statins have benefits that typically outweigh the side effects, and confusingly they seem to protect people from dementia as well as causing issues with memory and cognition. It's nothing to regret, just worth knowing it's a factor.
I looked it up, it's this research here so depending on how it's written up I can definitely see it potentially benefiting a subset of society.
That said, the bar for PhD research is it has to make an original contribution of new material to its field - that's for the universities to gatekeep. PhDs only have to be "of benefit to NZ" above and beyond that if they are getting direct funding from the Government (or other funding body with that requirement).
But either way a PhD is literally a piece of research so anyone undertaking one has to, well, research all the relevant info to the very best of their ability.
I think the issue here is whether their staff are funded to the level to meet these OIAs and if not, their manager should have requested her to apply for funding to cover it. Which is hard to know without knowing what the level of access actually was.
There's a wikipedia article on her and she seems to mainly be a film maker/journalist not an academic, and is now involved in adoption activism around people who weren't allowed to know who their real parents are. So the request about her name kind of makes more sense to me in that context.