Health officials are mulling over who – and who shouldn’t - get a Covid jab in 2024, as figures reveal millions of vaccine doses have gone to waste this year. Photo / Bevan Conley
Health officials are mulling over who – and who shouldn’t - get a Covid jab in 2024, as figures reveal millions of vaccine doses have gone to waste this year. Photo / Bevan Conley
Health officials are mulling over who – and who shouldn’t - get a Covid jab in 2024, as figures reveal millions of vaccine doses have gone to waste this year.
Nearly four years into the Covid-19 pandemic, New Zealand continues to report hundreds of virus-related hospitalisations each week - while total deaths are likely to top 3500 by the year’s end.
At this point, however, the Immunisation Advisery Centre (IMac) wasn’t recommending giving further vaccinations to everyone, but to those vulnerable Kiwis who needed top-ups most.
“There’s still masses of Covid around – but the people who are getting it severely are still mostly older people, and people with significant medical problems,” the group’s medical director Dr Nikki Turner explained.
Having gained immune memory from vaccination and infection, most younger, healthier people were now getting the virus “pretty mildly”, she said.
“The problem with Covid and older people is that they’re not developing long-term, durable immunity – so they need repeated vaccination.”
Te Whatu Ora and IMac recently advised those likely to benefit from another boost right now were those aged over 75; Māori and Pasifika people aged over 65; people aged between 30 and 74 with significant complex health needs; and those aged 16 and older who were “severely immuno-compromised”.
“At this stage, we’re not recommending younger and healthy mid-life people have further vaccines,” Turner said, “and we’re definitely not recommending healthy children have vaccines, because they develop very good immune responses.”
Immunisation Advisery Centre medical director Dr Nikki Turner. Photo / Mark Mitchell
As for what future boosting regimes should look like in New Zealand, decisions could hinge on whether Covid-19 began following an influenza-like seasonal pattern – at which point the aim would be to vaccinate high-risk people before winter.
“But because we’re still seeing a lot of Covid through summer, we’re still recommending six-monthly boosters.”
To ease pressure off the health system ahead of last winter, New Zealand went for a wider rollout, offering the Omicron-targeted bivalent booster to everyone over 30.
Te Whatu Ora data indicated many didn’t opt for it - just under 440,000 doses of the third booster have been given since April 1.
While New Zealand’s main drive in 2021 succeeded in vaccinating more than 90 per cent of the eligible population – with around 70 per cent receiving a first booster – general uptake since then had fallen.
To date, only about 55 per cent of those eligible over-50-year-olds have received a second booster, with fewer than four in 10 of those aged between 50 and 64 bothering to get that extra top-up.
At the same time, Te Whatu Ora figures provided to the Herald show large numbers of Covid-19 vaccines have been wasted this year, after doses expired at national warehouses.
Source / Te Whatu Ora
That included 1.7 million doses of the Novavax vaccine – all of which were listed as expiring in May – along with 1.4m doses of the original Pfizer vaccine, 71,442 doses of its bivalent vaccine, 135,710 doses of the paediatric vaccine and 6590 doses of the infant vaccine.
New Zealand purchased nearly 11m doses of the original Pfizer vaccine in 2021 – reportedly at a rate of about $36.50 per dose – before ordering another 4.7m to ensure it could cover the population.
New Zealand reportedly shipped in another 1.7m of the bivalent vaccines ahead of this year’s pre-winter rollout.
Pharmac chief medical officer Dr David Hughes said the agency would be seeking advice from its immunisation advisery committee this month before making decisions about the Covid-19 vaccine for next year.
“We’ll consider international recommendations on the antigen composition of Covid-19 vaccines and the vaccines that have Medsafe approval,” he said.
“We understand that Medsafe has received applications from suppliers for updated variant vaccines and [is] currently assessing these.”
Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration last month granted full registration for that new vaccine, as well as for Moderna’s new XBB-targeted Spikevax.
A MedSafe spokesperson told the Herald the regulator had received initial data from Pfizer as part of the company’s New Zealand application and would begin its evaluation shortly.
A Pfizer spokesperson said with the Covid-19 landscape continuing to evolve, it was unclear what the need for further updated vaccines would be in future.
“However, the virus that causes Covid-19 has proven itself to be highly prone to mutations, similar to influenza, so annual vaccine updates seem likely.”
Hughes said Pharmac recently published a call for funding applications for Covid-19 vaccines “to inform our future approach to procurement and supply”.
“This would not be for supply in the 2024 season, but for later years.”
For those who needed a boost now, New Zealand’s existing bivalent vaccines – targeting the earlier BA.4 and BA.5 lineages – were still effective against Omicron strains circulating now, Turner said.
“Just as with flu vaccines, the closer the match, the better the effectiveness – and I think it’s likely that New Zealand would change to a more updated strain, particularly before winter next year.”
Jamie Morton is a specialist in science and environmental reporting. He joined the Herald in 2011 and writes about everything from conservation and climate change to natural hazards and new technology.
