Vaccination no free pass: Bloomfield
WELLINGTON: A vaccinated New Zealand could open the borders to more countries, but Alert Level 2.5 might then be the new normal, Directorgeneral of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield says.
He made the comment during a media briefing yesterday in response to whether the vaccine rollout would need to finish before the borders could open beyond safe travel zones like Australia.
‘‘I strongly believe that — even alongside vaccination — we may well need to lift our baseline level of public health protective behaviours as part of our move to open up to a wider group of lowrisk countries — let alone beyond that,’’ Dr Bloomfield said.
‘‘It may well be that we need to be more of a 2.5 level as our baseline, alongside vaccination, as part of the protections we need in place to be able to open the border.
At a preBudget speech in Auckland yesterday, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern laid out some of the Government’s thinking about how the borders could reopen.
She has previously said the borders would have to stay closed until Kiwis had been vaccinated, except for countries with no Covid such as Australia and — from next week — the Cook Islands.
She said yesterday that vaccinated people from overseas might be able to come to New Zealand before the vaccine rollout was finished.
The factors to consider, she said, included how well vaccines prevented transmission between vaccinated people, and whether new variants of the virus were emerging, which could cause an uncontrolled outbreak regardless of how vaccinated New Zealanders were.
Dr Bloomfield added other considerations, including population vaccination rates and how much transmission there was in the country in question.
Opening the border to a country with high rates of vaccination as well as community transmission would likely lead to the virus being imported to New Zealand, he said.
‘‘Even with a very highly effective vaccine like Pfizer, which has 95% efficacy against symptomatic Covid19, that still means for every 1000 people travelling from that country who might be fully vaccinated, there’ll be 50 of that 1000 who might have got infected.’’
There would likely be a point in the future where New Zealand diverged from elimination and lived with Covid19, he said.
‘‘There’s no doubt that in a future — and this is a threeto fiveyear horizon — as vaccination rates increase around the world and Covid19 moves to being a more endemic disease, rather than an epidemic or pandemic, it will be in communities or in countries routinely around the world.
‘‘That means that here in New Zealand and other countries, there will need [to be] really good public health systems in place for identification, contact tracing and followup — and testing.’’
For now, Dr Bloomfield said, vaccination was secondary to keeping the virus out.
There might be disruptions to the supply of Pfizer vaccines that are due to arrive in larger numbers in July, he said, but so far the supply had been uninterrupted.
Contingency plans were to use the other vaccines if necessary, but Dr Bloomfield said the plan for now was still based fully on the Pfizer vaccine.
The rollout plan could also accommodate an additional 250,000odd 12 to 15yearolds — potentially in schools — should MedSafe approve Pfizer for that age group.
One new case of Covid19 was reported in managed isolation and quarantine yesterday. — The New Zealand Herald