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Vaccination all that matters for Labour

Luke Malpass Political editor

The winter recess has one week left to go before most politicians will be back in Wellington, hoping that the worst of the winter weather is almost behind us.

These next few weeks will be crucial for the vaccination programme, and how it is perceived among the public. From Jacinda Ardern to Chris Hipkins on down – with some helpful encouragement from Ashley Bloomfield – the refrain has been ‘‘it’s not how you start, it’s how you finish’’. In other words, what matters is getting the whole population done, and a high proportion of it.

In a purely public health sense, that is surely true. But this is pandemic politics. New Zealand may end the programme very effectively, but sometimes the perception of a shambles in the middle is the thing that sticks.

The Government took a view at the start of the year that it was easier to have one vaccine: the Pfizer one. Because there was no Covid, a slow start was fine. It wasn’t slow by design, but because there were limited stocks of the vaccine available. Necessity, however, was turned into a virtue and the Government used the time to try to get its systems down pat.

Now bigger quantities of vaccine are arriving and the programme will ramp up. But it’s clearly behind schedule and the Government is essentially fiddling the numbers to make it look as if the rollout to the general population has begun by the end of July as promised – it is doing this by holding the first mass vaccination event in Auckland next weekend. Yet there are still loads of people in category 3 – older people, asthmatics, people with other underlying health conditions – who have not been vaccinated.

Given there’s no Covid circulating in NZ, this doesn’t currently matter in any real-world sense. But it is a significant failure of both the rollout plan and the Government’s messaging.

Even the fact – highlighted by National this week – that New Zealand hadn’t ordered big quantities of the Pfizer vaccines before it got Medsafe approval (but after loads of other countries had been using it) could play into latent public suspicions that the Government hasn’t been quite as urgent about all this as it could have been.

It is the same in Australia. The slow vaccine rollout didn’t really matter – until suddenly it did.

Because of the size of the current outbreak in New South Wales in particular, the risk weighting of the Australian vaccine programme has changed greatly. The AstraZeneca vaccine, which has an extremely rare blood-clotting side-effect, was officially limited to those aged over 60 a few short weeks ago.

Now, because of the increased Covid risk, under-40s are being encouraged to get it, and the gap between shots – which in an ideal world would be 12 weeks – has now been halved. Slightly less individual protection is outweighed by the community protection of getting more people fully vaccinated more quickly.

The point is that, at the start of June, things were going great in Australia, and now they aren’t – as was highlighted by New Zealand stopping trans-Tasman travel for eight weeks from midnight last night.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison even apologised on Monday for the slowness of the rollout. This, more than anything else, is the political situation that Ardern and Labour want to avoid.

If New Zealand does manage to keep Covid out, and the Government does indeed manage to vaccinate basically everyone by the end of the year – remember, Ardern called this ‘‘the year of the vaccine’’ in January – it will have succeeded, and the current laggardly pace of the rollout won’t matter.

But it is starting to become a frustration. A couple of months ago hardly anyone you talked to was worried much about getting the vaccine; now, particularly among older people, there seems to be more urgency and more concern that it hasn’t happened yet. The travel bubble and cases in Australia probably serve to heighten that anxiety.

If the Delta variant of Covid does make its way to these shores, the slowness of the vaccine programme will be brought into sharp relief. There is a quiet scepticism now in NSW that the state will ever get this variant back under control through lockdowns, and a growing belief that only vaccination will work.

It’s easy to forget, because there’s been such a good run of keeping Covid out, that all of New Zealand still lives under a standing alert system. Wellington got a sharp reminder of this only a few weeks back.

The vaccine programme – in a broader political sense – is just about the only thing that matters. It’s the ticket back to something like normality, and it is going to be the only thing that’s will shift the dial on who can travel where, and with what level of convenience.

If Labour manages to pull it off, it will be a big tick in the competence column. While clearly plenty of Kiwis were happy with the handling of Covid last year, they marked Labour down on more mundane matters such as transport and housing.

The next few weeks will be crunch time.

Opinion

en-nz

2021-07-24T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-07-24T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/281779927151133

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