What is going on with vaccinations?

We don’t know yet whether we have dodged a bullet over our latest Covid scare. Cabinet will decide today whether Wellington will come out of level 2 after it was confirmed a Sydney tourist had the highly contagious Delta variant.

So far, so good. After thousands of tests, no cases of community transmission have been detected – yet. But maybe that’s not such a good thing when it comes to shaking us Kiwis out of our complacency.

Despite the example across the Tasman, where Greater Sydney has just gone into a two-week lockdown, we’re still acting as though Covid is something that happens ‘‘somewhere else’’. The number of people bothering to scan into venues remains pathetically low (apart from the usual last-minute surge whenever there’s a case). All this latest scare has done, meanwhile, is shine a light on just how vulnerable we are as a nation thanks to the snail’s pace of the vaccination programme.

According to the OECD, we’re now last among developed nations. Yet we seem to be alarmingly complacent about that fact as well.

Far too many people seem to be intolerant of any questions by the media as ‘‘negative’’; many would happily close the borders again, rather than question why we are falling so far behind.

We can all agree that we have been hugely privileged as one of the few Covid-free countries in the world.

But the single most pressing health and economic issue facing us as a nation at the moment is vaccination speed. Just about every other decision our Government makes on our behalf flows from that.

Its oft-repeated line is that we are on or ahead of schedule – which would come as a surprise to anyone who suffers from a serious underlying health condition, and who has been told by their GP or Healthline that it’s not their turn yet.

Equally surprised will be those whose elderly parents are still waiting for a call-up, even while we hear of perfectly fit, able-bodied young people who’ve been able to get vaccinated just by turning up at a clinic at the right time.

Being ‘‘ahead of schedule’’ is actually a meaningless accomplishment if the bar is set so low it’s impossible to fail (let’s assume that the Government learnt some lessons after overpromising on KiwiBuild by around 100,000 houses).

This is all sounding alarmingly familiar. Last year, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield used their platform at the 1pm press conference to slap down journalists asking about a shortage of flu vaccine stocks. Yet later reports proved the shortage was real.

It was the same with a shortage of personal protective equipment for health workers, which was debunked as rubbish, but later proved to be true.

We have a proud history of questioning authority in this country; we should be forcing the Government to front every day on the reasons why people who were supposed to have been vaccinated by now, aren’t.

And we need to keep asking till it happens.

We should be forcing the Government to front every day on this issue.