The Ministry of Health later confirmed just three of the 107 people who had so far tested positive for Covid-19 were double jabbed; 14 had received one dose.
The revelation is unsurprising given prior to the outbreak most people under the age of 50 were blocked from booking an appointment.
Since last week's Delta incursion, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has been unapologetic and dismissive of any criticism of the government's vaccination campaign.
Ardern has batted away questions by claiming a higher immunisation rate would not have saved New Zealand from lockdown. That may well be the case, but it will come as cold comfort to those individuals cooped up in Jet Park with Covid-19.
As the prime minister herself acknowledged, a "large number" of them were ineligible to be vaccinated, denied the defence which could have protected them from the virus or at least its worst effects.
New Zealand's vaccination programme has been staggeringly slow by international standards, among the last in the developed world. Only recently has it begun to ramp up.
The sluggish pace is in part due to deliberate decisions by the government.
Given the country's then-Covid-free status, ministers chose not to follow other countries in rushing the vaccine approval processes, instead allowing regulator Medsafe to carry out a months-long rigorous assessment.
By the time Pfizer was given the green light in early February and the first batch had arrived in the country, more than 15 million doses had been doled out in the United Kingdom. In the United States, the number was nearly 53 million.
Most countries are using a wide portfolio of vaccines but in March New Zealand decided to go all in on Pfizer, choosing to inoculate everybody with the same vaccine based on its strong performance and fewer side-effects.
As a result, the government declined deliveries from other suppliers earlier this year. That too has meant a slower rollout.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle to ramping up has been Pfizer's supply schedule which put off the largest deliveries until mid-July.
Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins this weekend told reporters New Zealand had used "every lever" to secure doses "as quickly as possible" from the pharmaceutical company.
"The prime minister has spoken directly with the chief executive of Pfizer on several occasions to see if we can speed up our deliveries," Hipkins said.
"Ultimately, we're dealing with a vaccine that's in high demand."
Opposition parties argue the government should have offered incentive payments to ensure early delivery, but Hipkins insists that was never an option.
In April, Ardern told Parliament New Zealand's delivery schedule was slower than other countries' as its people were "not dying while they wait".
The suggestion is that Pfizer deemed countries like New Zealand and Australia lower priority due to their earlier success in defeating Covid-19. That might also explain why Australia has grappled with similar supply problems.
That is one possibility. Another is that the government's negotiators came late to the party, did a poor job and got a raw deal.
After all, the government did not sign supply agreements with Pfizer until October last year and then again in March. For comparison, the US and UK reached deals in May last year.
The answers, or at least some, may lie in those contracts but Cabinet has refused to release them, citing confidentiality.
For months, ministers have rationalised many of the decisions surrounding the vaccine rollout on the basis there was no Covid-19 in the community and so no need to act with undue haste.
That is no longer the case. Delta is here, and there are at least 107 New Zealanders who deserve more than a glib brush-off.
- Craig McCulloch
Related Stories
Comments
An interesting piece. Mr McCulloch raises a good number of interesting questions and equally he misses known facts and details that would assist him in receiving his explanation.
The responsibility for vaccine rollout was given toy DHB's. The reality is that there is no other agency in NZ that could do it. The MoH was responsible for providing the tools, the vaccines, the systems, the admin procedures, the staff training programmes required for delivering the actual rollout.
DHB's throughout the country are known to be totally inefficient, some are abysmal and some are just about approaching unsatisfactory. They were always going to take an age to do the job and so it proved. Some were better than others but most took until the end of July before there was any momentum and in the last month they have really started rolling along.
Yes, there are a lot of unanswered questions and yes there may be blame to be allocated but Mr McCulloch's scatter gun inquisition approach does not help in this purpose.
Far better to nail down the facts first, establish responsibilities for actions, get the chronology sorted. Only then can you truly start identifying if and why rollout was sluggish.
Another long winded endorsement of the labour party, the DHB's although being hopeless cant administer what they don't have!!! the Government's job is to protect its people, they have failed completely, enough said
Anyone who thinks the questions raised by Mr McCulloch can be answered in short glib sound-bites is deluded. That's the failing strategy adopted by crusher collins and is seen by the NZ public for what it is, a dead loss.
Yes, first duty of any Govt is to protect its people. So far this Govt has done extremely well in doing that. Whether they are able to maintain their envious record in the face of Delta remains to be seen, but I do agree throwing in the towel is not the answer.
Yes the DHBs and MoH are pretty inefficient but there were other credible routes that could have been taken at an early stage. GP practices and pharmacies already do the flu vaccine. They could have been involved much earlier if the MoH had done a half decent job.
By what process have you reached the conclusion that using GP's/pharmacies at an earlier stage would be a credible alternative?
The fact that they have been delivering flu vaccines for years is no indication that they could have coped with covid 19 vaccinations. At the very least a national database was needed to be developed and installed, rather than using the patchwork of locally developed systems that have been cobbled together.
There have been news stories on this since the beginning of the year, and apart from few noisy Drs who seem desperate to get on the vaccination funding bandwagon they, the medical and pharmacutical Assns seem to have accepted it.
I do agree however that whether or not the delays this caused are reasonable does need to be tested.
Gasp..are we allowed to criticise her and her government on their fobbing us off..
shhssss they are watching us.
Somebody dropped the ball! Who?
Now this is a sensible question, although I would take it back a step and be asking "Did someone drop the ball?"
The issue is: Is what we have achieved the best we could have expected? Or have we been let down by incompetence?
Do not question us, you will obey, resistance is futile......
The vaccine roll out has been a national embarrassment. Vaccines not ordered early enough, far too long to approve them, choosing only one vaccine, not ordering enough; the list goes on. Added to that the weasel words from the PM at every turn and we only hear of 'hitting our targets'. Easy enough if you set very low targets. Thanks to some of our academics there have been some good decisions made but the MoH and government have failed us badly.
And yet... only 26 NZers have died from covid 19 complications.
No matter how you assess that, it is not a failure by any stretch of the imagination.
We have been lucky in that it is relatively easy to lock down a remote island with a small population. Our lacklustre government have no real plan other than to lock us down and hope that enough people are vaccinated sometime in the distant future. They didn't order enough vaccines early enough and now we lag behind. They had no rollout plan and had to make it up on the hoof. BTW GPs and pharmacies have the skills and means to have got the ball rolling for vaccinations. You might want to ask your friends in government why the training for vaccinators takes 5 hours for skilled practitioners. Oh, of course, they gave the contract to a private company with no competition.
So, our low death rate is no reflection on our preparation for the future. It must be hard trying to defend the indefensible all the time!
NZ's undoubted success to date has been because of superior planning and management by the Govt, It is not luck. Organisations relying on luck go out of business. To say that the plan consisted of locking down our remote island and hoping we get enough people vaccinated is just farcical.
We have always had enough vaccines. Yes, there was a point where a delay in restocking threaten the rollout, but it never happened and rollout has never been affected by vaccine supply. That's not why it has been sluggish.
No, they didn't have a rollout plan. No country did. This was a new situation, everything had to be built from scratch and as you say, made up on the hoof. This a simple fact of life, How else would they have done it?
We've always had vaccination training programmes. These are required by the manufacturers/suppliers of the vaccines. All nurses, pharmacists, doctors, technicians who administer vaccines must go through training, always have. The training is different for each vaccine. All training in NZ is provided by IMAC, has been since 1997. The Govt did not give the contract to a private company, absolute rubbish.
On point Ird. People I’ve spoken to from Australia and Europe are thoroughly impressed with the communication citizens receive re this virus. We are fortunate and to quick to blame.
If you are in charge and it fails, you are to blame, and as far as communication goes, don't worry about people in Europe, ask the people who have had no messages from this Government over a whole range of issues just not their Covid vaccination, MIQ etc.