Marae push to lift vaccination rates

A collective of marae around the Kā whia harbour are banding together to encourage whā nau in their community to get vaccinated.

The Kā whia harbour region between Taharoa and Kā whia is fighting to lift the vaccine uptake before the Auckland border opens.

The eight marae of Ngā Marae o Kā whia Moana have hosted vaccine clinics, worked with local Mā ori health providers and shared promotional campaigns.

Ngā Marae o Kā whia Moana was originally formed years ago as a way for the eight marae to join together under one umbrella to support common kaupapa.

When the pandemic became a serious concern for their communities, the collective was revived again.

Marae collective spokeswoman and Waipapa Marae trust chairwoman Cathy Holland said they are concerned their community will suffer when the borders open.

She said they are exposed and vulnerable due to the number of people unvaccinated and a lack of staff and resources to cover the whole region.

‘‘We’ve got this wave coming, and we believe it is definitely coming, but we are still exposed, we are still vulnerable.

‘‘But the number of providers, the number of Mā ori providers that we’ve got in the Waikato is not sufficient to be able to deal with the numbers that we’re having to vaccinate.

‘‘The biggest issue we’ve got is around capacity and capability because our providers already, are exhausted,’’ she said.

From the beginning of the outbreak in 2020, the marae collective has felt they had started off behind in terms of the amount of financial assistance and resources they could deploy automatically to target vulnerable areas within their communities.

Holland said funding organisations were initially not very forthcoming with additional financial support as they did not consider the Kā whia Harbour area to be in dire need.

She said since making it clear to funders that they were in fact at risk of the virus, funding eventually was provided.

‘‘I immediately saw red flags

. . . I just went back, and I said, ‘Look, your information that you’ve got around how we are surviving in Kā whia Moana is totally wrong.’

‘‘We are an isolated, rural Mā ori community, and we are even more vulnerable than a community based out in Hamilton for example.

‘‘We got the funding through Trust Waikato and then eventually through Civil Defence we got paid to establish a food bank,’’ she said.

But now with the onset of the Delta outbreak in full force, the marae collective is trying to focus its attention towards those in the community who are struggling to get vaccinated, whether it’s due to concerns around the vaccine or accessibility issues.

‘‘The focus this time has been on ensuring that all of our whā nau are vaccinated . . . so, in the first instance, tested and then vaccinated.

‘‘This kind of came to a head when we got our first case in Kā whia and that’s kind of when we went on red alert.

‘‘We had whā nau members, and we knew that we were always going to have whā nau members who were reluctant or wouldn’t want to get vaccinated, so that’s kind of how we’ve gone from being a food bank during Covid to really participating on the ground level of not only testing and vaxing our whā nau but encouraging whā nau members,’’ she said.

The Kā whia Harbour region has so far had two positive cases and has increased the rate of testing and vaccination while working alongside the Waikato District Health Board and Mā ori health provider Raukura Hauora.

Throughout, the collective continues in its efforts to address those in the community who were anti-vax either for political reasons or due to a loss of trust in the health system.

‘‘We do have a few of them around the harbour who don’t want a bar of the vaccination programme,’’ Holland said.

‘‘We did three days of testing and vaccinating . . . we managed to get a lot of our whā nau members to be vaccinated . . . and just recently we’ve done another pop-up.

‘‘One of the issues we have had is that the data we are getting both from the Ministry of Health and the DHB, I’m not convinced is entirely accurate. What we’ve been told is that currently around the harbour there are 161 whā nau members who haven’t been vaccinated, I’ve got a feeling that there is actually more than that,’’ she said.

Holland is worried about the impact that opening Auckland’s border could have on the small, isolated community.

She said it was disheartening to work so hard to protect their community, only to be at risk of exposure when the borders open with some whā nau still not vaccinated.

She said the collective was now considering whether having unvaccinated whā nau at their respective marae was going to be safe, given they were already under a significant amount of pressure trying to protect their community

Holland said it was definitely high on the agenda to have some type of vaccine mandate because protecting everyone was more important than the personal beliefs of individuals.

‘‘We’ve got this wave coming, and we believe it is definitely coming, but we are still exposed, we are still vulnerable’’

Waipapa Marae trust chairwoman Cathy Holland