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Tuesday, August 31, 2021

Heather du Plessis-Allan: Labour is putting its political reputation ahead of protecting us from Covid

 

Can we just stop and think about how crazy this is: 

In the middle of an outbreak – our government is seriously talking about slowing down our vaccination rate, because otherwise they will run out of supply. 

Surely, it’s better to have those vaccines in arms rather than the freezer?  

Surely, it’s better to simply jab until you run out?  

Because at least that way, you’ve protected every Kiwi you possibly can, rather than hoarding vaccines and blocking them from Kiwi’s. 

There is only one reason that the government would rather slow down and that’s so they don’t’ have to say the embarrassing words ‘we’ve run out’.  

Because that make global headlines “New Zealand runs out vaccine”. 

Today, Associate Minister of Health Ayesha Verrall said they can’t sustain 91K jabs a day - which is what we did on Thursday last week - but they can sustain 50-60K thousand a day. 

So, they are considering deliberately dropping the rate by up to 40K doses a day. 

So, what they’d be doing is telling up to 40K Kiwis every day that they’re not going to get vaccine protection from delta, during an outbreak, because Labour needs to avoid an embarrassing headline. 

That is literally the calculation that’s happened. 

If Labour does this then it has made the decision that it is more important to save face globally than it is to get you jabbed if you’re one of those 40K kiwis who miss every single day. 

And by the way 40K a day is 280K a week is 1.1m a month. That’s a lot of us who go unprotected to save face. 

I’m assuming the slowdown has already started.  

Already people in our office have had their jabs cancelled, one of them was for Saturday two days ago.  He’d booked it in July.  He got his cancellation notification on the way to his jab.  

Already the vaccination rate for yesterday was way down to 48K  

That is the lowest all week, in a week where we did 63K Monday, 80K Tuesday, 88K Wednesday, 91K Thursday, 89 Friday and 78K Saturday. 

Labour putting its political reputation ahead of you staying protected from Covid is frankly outrageous. 

Get it out of the freezer.  Get it in arms.  If we run out, we run out, but at least more kiwis have protection that way. 

Heather du Plessis-Allan is a journalist and commentator who hosts Newstalk ZB's Drive show.

2 comments:

DeeM said...

What's more concerning, according to an article on the ACT website, is Minister Hipkins decision back in June to postpone delivery of some of the 8 million doses needed to finish vaccinating everyone in the country, which we were due to have by end of September, until October and November.
Apparently it was due to concerns that some would expire. Now, the Pfizer vaccine has a 6-month shelf life if stored properly, so the Minister clearly did not expect everyone to be vaccinated by the end of March next year.
At the time we were doing about 20,000 vaccinations a day and Chris saw no reason to increase that, even though all the vaccines would have been available in the next couple of months.
Then along comes the Delta outbreak in August and the government decides we need to be vaccinating more people so within a few weeks we have up-scaled to give 90,000 jabs a day. But, damn, we've told Pfizer to take until November and now we're going to run out.

This appears to be incompetence at the highest level. But the key question is: Why did the government not up-scale from 20,000 a day long before the Covid outbreak, when they knew they would have all the vaccines they needed by end of September? Are they really that inept or were they trying to extend the political capital from the vaccine program.
With this lot who knows. Either option is perfectly plausible and both are probably true.

Anna Mouse said...

The vaccine stroll out is more a political concern to the Government than it has EVER been a health concern.

They are marxists through and through.