New Zealand ‘must stay the course and keep Covid-19 out’

New Zealand should attempt to keep Covid-19 out of the country indefinitely, even after the nation is largely vaccinated, advisers tell the Ardern government.

New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern reacts in parliament yesterday. Picture: Mark Graham

New Zealand should attempt to keep Covid-19 out of the country indefinitely, even after the population is largely vaccinated, the Ardern government’s expert ­advisory group says.

In a marked departure from the rest of the world, the panel said a combination of vaccination and low-level border measures should prevent the virus from becoming endemic in New Zealand.

The panel, which was tasked by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern with formulating a post-pandemic plan, said there should be no change from the strategy of eliminating the coronavirus.

Any reopening would be contingent on completing the vaccination rollout and it would occur in phases, the panel led by epidemiologist David Skegg said.

One of the few other concrete recommendations was to narrow New Zealand’s travel bubbles with Australia and the Cook ­Islands to only include vaccinated travellers once the rollouts in each country were progressed.

Ms Ardern will outline her government’s response to the recommendations on Thursday.

That response is likely to shine a spotlight on the country’s sluggish immunisation program.

Since mid-July, New Zealand has trailed Australia and other OECD-member nations by every metric – although Ms Ardern has not faced the same level of criticism as Scott Morrison.

How Australia and NZ compare on Covid-19 vaccinations.

While Mr Morrison was forced to apologise for the pace of Australia’s rollout, it is unlikely Ms Ardern will need to do the same.

“Right at the beginning of the year, we said that this would be the year of the vaccine campaign, that this would be the largest undertaking of our health system, around a vaccination, that we have ever seen. And so far, we are running according to our plans,” Ms Ardern said last month when asked whether she would follow suit with an apology.

Just over a quarter of New Zealanders have received a first dose of the Pfizer vaccine, the only one authorised for use in the country.

Only 21.5 per cent of the eligible population, aged 16 and above, is fully vaccinated.

The main source of the delay has been a lack of supply, ­although the government insists Pfizer is delivering to the schedule it had expected. And the vaccine program is just now scaling up.

New Zealand’s rollout has also been uneven across regions and ethnic groups. The country’s decentralised health system has left regional health boards in charge, leading to more than a third of adults in some areas receiving a vaccine, compared to less than a quarter in Wellington.

Maori, who make up more than 16 per cent of the population, have received less than 10 per cent of the vaccines distributed so far. New Zealanders of European and Asian descent are over-rep­resented in the rollout.

While the government says this is because Maori are disproportionately represented in younger age groups who haven’t yet had access to doses, health experts have pushed back.

Rawiri Jansen, a co-director of the National Maori Pandemic Group, resigned from the Health Department’s advisory panel in April. He said he wanted Maori to be prioritised because a younger Maori person would suffer more severe outcomes than an older European might.

“Clearly the vaccination program is not delivering for Maori communities now,” Dr Jansen told Radio New Zealand on Monday. “If we’re worried about an outbreak of (the Delta variant) into a situation where the Maori community is the least vaccinated community in the country, that’s very disturbing.”

New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern address the house in parliament yesterday. Picture: Mark Graham

Despite these issues, criticism of the vaccination program is not widespread. While Ms Ardern’s Labour Party has fallen in recent polls, it would still be able to govern with help from the Green Party on current numbers.

And while the country’s medicines regulator has since ­approved the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, the government says it still plans to stick to Pfizer. That’s a conscious trade-off: A slower rollout, but a simpler and more effective one.

“Our vaccine rollout is still moving at a glacial pace, so if Covid-19 does get through the border, our largely unvaccinated population would be vulnerable,” said Chris Bishop, the pandemic spokesman for the opposition ­National Party.