NZ rollout needs a sharp shot

The first person to get a Covid-19 vaccine was an elderly woman, Margaret Keenan, in Britain last December. It was the first of 800,000 doses of the Pfizer/ BioNTech vaccine the United Kingdom distributed initially.

Exactly five months later, plenty of New Zealanders of a similar age, some with serious health problems, are still awaiting the jab.

The Government here, with valid reasons, chose to first focus on border, MIQ and frontline workers, and high-risk areas. But the pace has been slow.

Hopefully, we get through vaccination by the summer without a major outbreak. But any delay is a risk. Vaccine rollout data makes it clear how behind we are.

The transtasman bubble has produced a trail of mini-alarms in a very short amount of time and Fiji has a concerning list of community cases.

Yet there still doesn’t seem much urgency, even though Australia has put back its aim to reopen in October. Australia’s Minister for Trade, Tourism and Investment Dan Tehan told Sky News last week his “best guess would be in the middle to the second half of next year”.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said last month that the country doesn’t have access to the same amount of vaccines that the United States and the UK do.

Yet it was pretty obvious last spring that vaccines were coming.

By late last week Australia had delivered 2.55 million vaccine doses for a population of 25.7m. NZ had managed 304,900 since February 21 but hopes to push it to 1,033,848 by June 27.

According to Our World in Data, New Zealand with 4.51 per cent is doing slightly better than the Asia average of 4.42 per cent for the share of population who have had at least one dose. Japan (2.2), Thailand (1.67) and Vietnam (0.69), for instance, are running worse.

For some European countries of similar size to New Zealand the percentages are: Finland (32); Ireland (30) and Norway (26.3). Ireland’s figures on Friday were 1,591,888 total jabs administered including 1,138,738 of the two-dose vaccine we are using.

One of the great ironies is that countries that best weathered the original storm are now lagging on the chance to seal in immunity. Vice-versa for the US and UK.

It seems that the force field of pressure caused by failure last year has, in the US and Europe, created an urgency to get on top of the problem. They had to deal with mass death, over-run hospitals, lengthy lockdowns and public frustration. Here, we are waiting out the siege with most of us missing a key weapon.