Auckland, we’ve got your back

There’s no misplaced sense of entitlement behind the calls from Aucklanders for priority status in the accelerating Covid-19 vaccine rollout. Granted, the benefits of vaccination, so crucial to our national wellbeing, don’t hit instantly, so the rollout is not a cure for Auckland’s unhappy hereand-now position as the base of the Delta outbreak.

The justification is longer term. Auckland is not just particularly vulnerable. It is also a national vulnerability.

Given its size, population density and gateway status, it’s hardly surprising that Auckland has more than twice the number of MIQ facilities as the rest of the country combined, or that it is still mired in level 4 lockdown, the unhappy epicentre of the latest outbreak.

All of which the Government has acknowledged, with Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins asserting that Auckland is, and will continue to be, at the front of Government thinking when it comes to rollout priorities.

Such reassurance was being sought by Auckland Mayor Phil Goff and, to be fair, it didn’t go without saying.

Yesterday marked the day the vaccination programme was extended to allow those aged 12 to 30 to make bookings, so there’s every prospect the surging demand, in which we should all rejoice, will continue this month. In which case supplies could run low and the rate need to slow, before a major intake arrives in October.

All going well – a perilous phrase to lean upon too heavily in a pandemic – we may yet avoid even a few weeks of constrained supply. Efforts have been under way to score a bridging intake of the vaccine, presumably swapping vaccine orders with countries where urgency is much less an issue because they are further advanced in their rollout.

And there appear to be plenty of those. Australia has found willing dealmakers in Poland and Singapore. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has indicated an announcement on her Government’s efforts within a few days.

Slowing, let alone halting, new bookings in other regions to keep Auckland up to pace is something Hipkins acknowledges only as a worstcase scenario.

Even if it happened, the bookings that people have already made nationwide would be honoured, he says.

Views do differ about whether, as things stand, a prioritisation shuffle within New Zealand is all that necessary. As Covid-19 modeller Professor Shaun Hendy pointed out, vaccines are long-term protectors, not short-term treatments. The benefits of wider vaccination are generally realised a month or two down the track. But be this as it may, the case for prioritising Auckland remains strong under the longer-term perspective.

Nobody elsewhere, including teenagers, should see this as reason to hold back from booking vaccinations. These are settings for the Government to control if necessary; the higher our collective immunisation level is, and the earlier it is achieved, the safer we all are.

Forget what you may have heard about younger age groups being less likely to get sick or transmit Covid-19. Delta is more contagious, and we have emerging evidence of juvenile susceptibility in hospitalisation rates.

Young people are socially busy, quick to interact, and mobile with it. For so many teenagers, if a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing. It’s a lifestyle that particularly suits a respiratory virus. Now’s their time to come forward, for everyone’s sake.

Nobody, including teenagers, should see this as reason to hold back from booking vaccinations.