Editorial: Vaccine rollout at a snail's pace

Whichever way you cut it, not enough New Zealanders have visited facilities such as this one at Manurewa Marae. Photo / Michael Craig

EDITORIAL

Spluttering reactions to Auckland District Health Board members getting vaccinated ahead of some frontline workers were understandable - many people are beginning to wonder whether they will ever get a jab, let alone join a queue.

Concern has been rising almost since the first batches of Pfizer vaccines landed in the second week of February. The first 60,000 doses actually arrived in Auckland from Belgium on a Singapore Airlines ahead of schedule. Since that momentous event, everything vaccine-related appears to have lagged.

The National Party this week launched another attack on the Government's rollout, citing a "leaked" document which showed New Zealand was 300,000 vaccines behind schedule. The Government says the document was an old briefing paper, but whatever.

Director general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield has reported just over 90,000 Covid jabs have been administered. This is, according to Covid Response Minister Chris Hipkins, "slightly behind schedule" and the rollout will "increase significantly," with DHBs forecast to deliver 55,000 doses over the next week – at roughly 7500 a day on average.

Read that last comment as, "we have been caught with our pants down and someone has just been kicked where it hurts to pick up their game".

The speed of the Government's vaccine rollout is not the only area that has come under fire recently – there has been mounting pressure over vaccine data on the Ministry of Health's website.

On Wednesday, the Herald reported that no vaccination progress numbers were on the Ministry of Health's website six weeks after the rollout had begun.

Later the same day, Bloomfield revealed that the ministry now has a much more up-to-date dashboard on its website. Whoopsie, someone else just got a size nine in the backside.

To be fair, the vaccination hot potato has been given to the district health boards to handle and, seemingly, they have tossed it from hand to hand while it cooled.

Our DHBs are notoriously stretched, fragmented, outdated and operating with too many layers of bureaucracy in the wrong areas. Every health minister since Adam has conceded the boards need an overhaul, the incumbent included.

Leaving the vaccination efforts to these bodies, there were bound to be bungles.

That said, this Government should have known that and kept a beady eye out to ensure some form of competence.