Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Photo / Robert Kitchin
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Photo / Robert Kitchin
OPINION:
I got my jab three days ago at the Auckland Airport vaccine drive-through. It was a breeze. The set-up was efficient, the staff were friendly, and the needle didn't hurt.
The scale of the operation was impressive. Dozens of cars, some packed full with people turned up, got jabbedand left in the 40 minutes I was there.
None of this is news to you because this is the same story you'll be hearing from virtually everyone who's got their jab already.
It's lucky for the Government that the people on the ground are doing such an amazing job. Because it creates goodwill.
If your real experience of getting the jab is this smooth, you'll probably feel a lot less grumpy that it's taken the Beehive way too long to get the vaccine into the country.
But there is political pressure and it's mounting by the day.
You can tell they're feeling it. The Beehive are trying their hardest - too hard really - to spin the vaccine rollout as a success. Kia ora koutou kātoa, the minister of the day starts the 1pm press conference, some good news: yesterday we administered this many vaccines. They ran that tactic for a few days until commentators began to mock the clumsiness of the hype.
The drive-through Covid-19 vaccination centre near Auckland Airport on August 20, 2021. Photo / Dean Purcell
Few are fooled. New Zealand hasn't languished at the bottom of the developed world for months because the rollout is going well.
The pressure prompted plan B: the Prime Minister announced last Sunday that she is working to buy vaccines off another country. She would announce it in a couple of days. That deadline came and went.
Since then, Australia has announced two such deals: 500,000 Pfizer doses from Singapore and then 4 million Pfizer doses from the UK.
Scott Morrison reportedly started the conversation with the UK in June at the G7. That shows foresight.
Unless Jacinda Ardern can announce something similar soon, questions will be asked about her foresight. Everything so far points to a lackadaisical attitude towards the vaccine rollout.
For the most part Kiwis have accepted the official explanation which is we have a supply issue and no control: we're at the mercy of Pfizer's decisions and timetables.
But that explanation is very quickly being undermined by the Australians, who've demonstrated that countries don't have to simply accept that fate. We can - and should - find other ways to get doses in.
Also, the official story's getting too messy. First we were getting all our doses delivered by the end of September, then we were getting them by the end of October, then it was because the Covid-19 Response Minister got his months confused, then it was because he'd actually asked Pfizer to delay some doses by a couple of months to avoid them expiring, then no he objects because that wasn't what happened but yes he admits he did have that conversation with Pfizer after all.
Even for those who don't follow the details closely, that sounds too untidy to be convincing.
What will really kill off Kiwi patience is if a deal takes too long and big numbers of vaccine bookings have to be cancelled to dampen demand. Already a trickle of people are reporting cancellations, but the overall jab rate is still high enough to look reassuring.
The Auckland lockdown is also likely to wear on patience with this rollout. The longer it drags on, the longer the Auckland outbreak threatens to leak to the rest of the country, the more laser-like focus there will be on the vaccination rate as a ticket out of current and future restrictions and infections.
It probably doesn't take many days in lockdown and many reports of booking cancellations to wipe away the goodwill of an efficient jab.
