Time for a war footing on climate

Surely the Ministry of Health and government must have known that the two vaccines were going to clash in April, the traditional start of the flu vaccine roll out?

Why are property owners on the Northland coast confused by council advice? Ice is melting everywhere. Consider just one glacier in Antarctica: Thwaites. Warm water is reaching deep into its underbelly and melting it from underneath. Will it break up and raise the sea level 650mm? We should know in 10 years.

Biden is on the warpath. John Kerry has already give Australia the message: reduce emissions. The UK has pledged a 78 per cent reduction on 1990 levels by 2035, what about New Zealand? Effectively 11 per cent. Kevin Anderson, former director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and now Professor of Energy and Climate Change at Manchester is quite blunt: We need to go onto a war footing. Anderson is no ivory tower academic, he is a former oil company engineer.

Maybe you believe 70,000 climate scientists are wrong – there's no urgency. But do you believe the local council has enough money to bail you out if they're right?

Dennis N Horne

Howick

Getting it right

On Tuesday, Covid vaccines were available for people 50-plus in age up near the hospital. I’d read that for my age group, 65-plus, vaccines weren’t going to be available until mid-May, so I’d had a flu shot eight days earlier. I was perplexed as to why the Covid vaccine was available to me earlier than I expected.

I understood that you had to wait 14 days after the flu vaccine before you could have the Covid one. As I was attending the fracture clinic the same day, and was early, I thought I’d go along and confirm I couldn’t get the vaccine, and ask when the next opportunity would be to do so. They confirmed the 14-day rule.

It turns out that the vaccinations were for the 75-plus age group, but because this age group had also been getting the flu shot they wouldn’t have enough participants for the Covid jab, so lowered the age group down to 50-plus.

Surely the Ministry of Health and government must have known that the two vaccines were going to clash in April, the traditional start of the flu vaccine roll out? Couldn’t they have coordinated so the vaccines were administered in an orderly fashion? They’ve had nine months to get this right, and are rolling it out slowly compared to the UK, which handled the pandemic badly had a fast roll out of the vaccine.

Several times during this pandemic Ashley Bloomfield and the Government have told us things that later turned out not to be true. From the personal protection equipment (PPE) for doctors and nurses being available in March/April last year when they weren’t, to quarantine staff being regularly tested, when they weren’t.

This pandemic has cost lives, cost business and jobs, and been a major hit to the economy, so when are we going to have an enquiry into how well we were prepared and how it has been handled?

Laurie Copland

Broadwood