Bloomfield lays out mass vaccination plan

Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield says he is confident everyone over 16 will be able to get both shots of the Covid19 vaccine before the end of 2021.

Yesterday, Bloomfield and two health officials sought to put meat on the bones of the mass vaccine rollout plan, which has been critiqued as vague and ill-defined.

From July, everyone aged 16 or over would be able to obtain the two-shot Pfizer vaccine in several ways – all for free.

They could visit their general practitioner, book in to pop-up or mobile clinics, or walk in to ‘‘super clinics’’, where tens of thousands might be vaccinated in a single day.

Bloomfield revealed the cost of the vaccine and its rollout to be between $1 billion and $2b – about 5 to 10 per cent of the routine annual health budget.

And he defended the pace of the rollout so far, saying it had taken six weeks to get through the first 100,000 doses – then just a week to get to do half that again.

‘‘Last Thursday was when we had 100,000 doses administered – by the end of today it will be 150,000,’’ Bloomfield said.

He said that after scaling the system up to between 12,000 and 15,000 doses, it would plateau until July, when the mass vaccination of the whole population would begin.

Before July, around 1.7 million people at higher risk should be able to access the vaccine from the start of May.

From July, it would ramp up to 50,000 to 60,000 doses a day in order to get the vaccine to the entire over-16 population by the end of the year.

‘‘I’m really confident that the health system can do it,’’ Bloomfield said.

Much of this would be done by GPs, but not every GP would be trained and able to use the vac

cine. Special super clinics would also be set up that could vaccinate up to 20,000 people in a day, at places such as stadiums and sports grounds.

‘‘You won’t have to have booked in to have a vaccine; we will have plenty of provision for people to walk in.’’

Bloomfield said volunteers would be useful to help run these events – and the ministry had been talking to the Electoral Commission about tapping into its 20,000-strong workforce used around elections.

Pharmacies were not being used at this point, but could be used in the future if needed. Bloomfield said it was useful to leave pharmacies’ capacity to be used for rolling out the normal flu vaccine and the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) catchup programme.

Bloomfield said Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern had spoken to Pfizer in recent weeks and the Government was absolutely confident of getting its full order of the vaccine by October.

He reiterated that GPs would not be able to charge for administering the vaccine – every appointment should be free.

And he said the Ministry of Health was keen to make sure that the vaccine was available across sparsely populated rural areas as well as big cities, leaving no ‘‘long tail’’ of rural vaccines.

Bloomfield said there were contingency plans in place to run the vaccine programme under a level 4 lockdown, although this would be a ‘‘challenge’’.

He said there were also plans to rapidly vaccinate an area if an outbreak happened there.

‘‘I’m really confident that the health system can do it.’’

Dr Ashley Bloomfield Director-General of Health