Bryce Edwards
democracyproject.nz
Dr Bryce Edwards is Political Analyst in Residence at Victoria University of Wellington. He is the director of the Democracy Project.
The journalist who has covered the vaccine rollout best is the Herald’s Derek Cheng. On Thursday he reported on the Government’s latest explanation for the delays – that GPs and pharmacists aren’t yet on board with DHB plans for delivering the doses – see: Not so ready to roll? From near-zero supply to 500k doses in reserve.
According to Cheng, it is reasonable that the Government couldn’t rollout the programme earlier when supplies of the vaccine were low, but “it’s hardly a model of efficiency to finally have the supply issue sorted but then be hamstrung by delivery capacity.”
The same day, Cheng also explained that the programme needs to deliver “about 50,000 doses a day to vaccinate four million people by December”, but “Chris Hipkins said that capacity to do so wouldn’t be ready until the end of August – six weeks away” – see: Health Ministry’s new plan – 170,000 fewer jabs by end of August (paywalled). In this, Cheng challenges the official explanation for the delays, saying “GPs and pharmacies [have been] crying out for months for more information and to be more involved”.
Also in this article, Cheng reports that DHBs have lowered their ambitions for how many doses they will administer over the next month – from 3.22 million doses to 3.05 million – which is “prompting questions over whether they’ve been changed to make it easier for DHBs to look ahead of target.”
The goal of the vaccination programme is to immunise a sufficiently high proportion of the population so that herd immunity is achieved – likely to require something over 80 per cent. However, Bernard Hickey is pessimistic that such levels will be possible without some innovative strategies, especially as many members of the public who say in surveys that they will get vaccinated inevitably won’t – see: Get ready for the big push to the finishing line on vaccination.
There are other signs that DHBs are not up to the job of the vaccine rollout. For example, Hannah Martin reports that nearly half of DHBs aren’t even collecting data about their own staff getting vaccinated – see: Nearly half of all DHBs do not know how many staff have been vaccinated. But what data is being collected showed DHB staff rates range “anywhere between 69.7 and 91 per cent”.
Many DHB systems for allowing the public to book their vaccinations have also been plagued with problems. For one example of this, see Sophie Cornish: Vaccine booking text with disconnected phone number and website sent ‘in error’ to more than 3000 people.
In the Canterbury region, the rollout has been particularly fraught and apparently is two months behind schedule. For an exploration of what’s been going on from the perspective of a resident and an associate professor in organisations and leadership at the University of Canterbury, see Bernard Walker’s Why I’m losing patience with the Canterbury vaccine rollout.
This article can be republished under a Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 license. Attributions should include a link to the Democracy Project.
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