Clark wants poor nations to get surplus vaccines

Former Prime Minister Helen Clark has called on New Zealand to send its millions of extra Covid19 doses on order to poor countries being ravaged by the virus.

New Zealand has enough doses to vaccinate the population nearly four times over. As well as the 10 million Pfizer doses, enough for the entire population of 5 million, there are enough Novavax, Janssen and Astrazeneca doses on order to inoculate 14.16 million people.

‘‘Our call to every high-income country like New Zealand, which has ordered significantly more than it can conceivably use, is get it back in the pool,’’ she told Stuff

Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States have enough vaccine doses to cover their populations twice.

Clark’s directive comes in the third and final report from the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response. The report, released yesterday, sets out a plan to slow the pandemic’s spread and prevent a future pandemic. It had seven recommendations with a slew of steps to achieve them.

It called for high income countries to donate at least 1 billion vaccine doses to low-to-mid income countries through the Covax agreement before September 1. Covax is an international vaccine alliance New Zealand invested $27 million into, and through which Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern promised 1.6 million doses to vaccinate 800,000 people in the Pacific islands.

The report also called for better governance over the public health response, setting up a global system of pandemic surveillance, and governance over the research, development and manufacturing of vaccines to ensure even distribution.

Separately, WHO has condemned global vaccine inequalities, which will see healthy adult New Zealanders and others from high-income nations jabbed ahead of healthcare workers and the elderly in poorer nations.

High-income countries were able to make deals with manufacturers to secure doses now and in the future, she said, but in many cases low and middleincome countries were shut out of these arrangements.

Its second report, released in January, criticised China’s early response to the pandemic while its first report set out its terms of reference.

But Clark, who co-chairs the panel, predicted the New Zealand Government would ensure excess vaccines were put back into distribution and said its obligations went beyond the Pacific Islands.