Serious edge to day of fun

If you are of a certain age, you might dimly recall lining up as a 13-year-old in a school gym or a draughty hall to get a shot in your arm against tuberculosis. If you’re older still, you got a polio jab at primary school, along with free milk.

No-one tried to make mass vaccination events look like fun, or portray them as being in the national interest. No-one asked you to close your eyes and think of New Zealand. You lined up because you were told to. And in the case of polio, there was genuine fear born of experience of epidemics.

Today’s Super Saturday and ‘‘vaxathon’’ appeals to a rosier sense of nostalgia. It asks you to remember a more cohesive, simpler New Zealand, when we gathered around one of our two TV channels to watch newsreaders shave off moustaches, take off shirts or do press-ups to raise money for a good cause.

Small children would appear with buckets of coins from a bottle drive. A fire brigade in a small town would pledge a certain amount and ask other fire brigades to match it. Try to tell your children that telethons counted as entertainment in the 1970s and they probably won’t believe you.

But nostalgia is a potent drug. Within seconds of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announcing that Super Saturday would include a vaxathon broadcast from Avalon, with friendly competition between centres, a new national earworm was launched: ‘‘Thank you very much for your (kind) vaccination.’’

Even RNZ’s Kim Hill was singing it by yesterday morning.

It’s easy to joke about it, but this event must be a success. Ardern has talked of wanting to set a record of 100,000 daily vaccinations, but that would be a relatively modest achievement.

The stated aim is to ensure that 90 per cent of the eligible population has had at least one dose. That would mean jabbing 41,000 people in Auckland alone.

There are plenty of gimmicks.

An Air NZ Dreamliner will become a vaccination centre in Auckland. Staff at a Papatoetoe clinic are handing out free hot chickens with every vaccine dose. A vax festival in east Porirua features live bands, virtual reality games and a DJ. If you get jabbed on the Earnslaw in Queenstown, you get a free coffee.

But there is more to it than simply persuading thousands of people to be vaccinated. This event is also about rebuilding social cohesion. A strong sense of national solidarity got us through the first year or more of Covid, after some adviser earned his or her keep by coining the phrase ‘‘team of five million’’.

That social cohesion has frayed dramatically with the spread of the Delta variant, and the alarming predictions of new case numbers. The worst-case scenario has Auckland and Northland seeing 5000 cases a week early next year, with between 5 and 10 per cent admitted to hospital.

The Government, and Ardern especially, desperately needs to wrestle back control of a Covid narrative that has slipped out of its grasp in recent weeks. A successful Super Saturday should be followed by firmer numbers and timelines, as well as desperately needed news about relaxed lockdown restrictions and an opening of borders.

The mass vax, with its sausage sizzles and songs, is about more than fun. It is about crossing a critical threshold in a war against Covid that has become tougher than New Zealanders expected.