David Seymour
ACT Leader
The ACT Party yesterday welcomed news that the Government is now wastewater testing in 95 locations, up from 26 at the start of the outbreak. It has softened on saliva testing, and even said it was open to home test kits, a technology it has so far banned citizens from importing.
ACT has been calling for all of these things, the issue is why they were not in place before the lockdown occurred?
Ardern today talked about “changing up our strategy” and a “collective goal to move away [from lockdowns].” She knows that country cannot afford to keep locking down.
The only thing left is to set a clear target for vaccination and get it done. Unfortunately, the Government is not being clear on what its target is, perhaps because it is in danger of running out of vaccine during September.
On publicly available data, the Government will run out of vaccine doses on September 10. That’s based on 87,000 doses per day, and Chris Hipkins announcements that the Government had a total of 750,000 doses on August 22 and expects deliveries of 380,000 per week, it will run out altogether on September 10 if there are no more doses.
Of course, in practice many specific vaccine centres will run out of stock long before then. We are hearing multiple reports from pharmacies where vaccine supply is rationed. If the Government does not increase the rate of delivery it will run out of doses, to do 87,000 every day it requires 610,000 doses per week, not 380,000.
It’s as though the Government had never heard of Delta until last week, now they’re scrambling they need to explain what the pathway to elimination without lockdowns really is, the picture remains very murky.
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