Māori Council says

Vaccinate tamariki before introducing the traffic light system or Māori children will be the casualties, the New Zealand Mā ori Council says.

The council has called for the Government to put a hold on its plans to lift the current alert level system in favour of the traffic light system until the paediatric vaccine has been delivered to 5- to 11-year-olds and Māori vaccination rates catch up to the general population’s.

New Zealand Māori Council co-chairman and South Auckland healthcare provider George Ngatai said the council had written to Associate Health Minister (Mā ori Health) Peeni Henare urging him to protect their children as schools begin to reopen across Auckland and the Delta variant spreads across the motu.

The Mā ori Council is worried about long Covid in children, he said, particularly in Mā ori kids who have a higher proportion of diseases such as rheumatic fever.

Yesterday Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said advice to the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in favour of authorising emergency use of the Pfizer vaccine for children was the first hurdle to get past before it could be considered by New Zealand.

Data from Pfizer-BioNTech indicated that the vaccine was more than 90 per cent effective at preventing symptomatic illness among tamariki.

In a preliminary analysis last week, FDA reviewers said the protection the vaccine gave would ‘‘clearly outweigh’’ the risk of a very rare side effect in almost all scenarios of the pandemic.

The FDA will now decide whether to take that advice on board and authorise its use in younger children.

The vaccine reviewed by the advisers was a paediatric version