Bryce Edwards
democracyproject.nz
Dr Bryce Edwards is Political Analyst in Residence at Victoria University of Wellington. He is the director of the Democracy Project.
The biggest problem so far for the vaccination programme has been the lack of supply of the Pfizer doses, and debate continues as to whether the Government has mismanaged the purchase of these drugs.
On Wednesday Thomas Coughlan reported new information to show that it wasn’t until January 29 that the Government actually made its order to Pfizer, and when it did so it only ordered a tiny amount – see: National questions ‘front of queue’ claim after revealing first Pfizer order just 54,000 doses.
According to this, National’s spokesperson Chris Bishop claimed that “New Zealand placed purchase orders for Pfizer months after the first doses arrived in other countries like the UK.” A spokesperson for the Government explained, in contrast, that the late timing was due to a “maximum safety” approach, given that MedSafe, the government’s drug authority, had not yet given the green light to this vaccine.
Economist Robert MacCulloch has argued that New Zealand’s decision to buy such a small number of doses was essentially based on false economy, as the cost of the early doses were more expensive – see: A Question to Health Minister Hipkins. In this, he says, “The cost-benefit arithmetic goes like this: for our population of just 5 million, paying $40 million more (for two doses) could have avoided billions upon billions of additional economic and well-being costs.”
The trickle of small batches into the country became something of a crisis last month, with the programme nearly running out. Political commentator Matthew Hooton outlined how “the Government arranged for 100,000 doses to be diverted from the world’s poorest countries in mid-June” – see: How many Covid deaths is too many? (paywalled).
Now there are increasing arguments being made to have the Covid vaccine manufactured in New Zealand. This was put forward by former Executive Director of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists, Ian Powell last month – see: Lessons for NZ from Cuba, the Covid-19 vaccine powerhouse?.
For other voices calling for local vaccine production, see Lucy Warhurst’s Growing calls for New Zealand to make our own Covid vaccines.
Finally, despite many commentators arguing that the vaccine rollout is taking too long, Sunday Star Times editor Tracy Watkins argued yesterday that the Government has now got the sequencing wrong, and there should be a delay to the extension of the programme until more vulnerable members of the public are vaccinated – see: Why the Government should delay rolling out the vaccine to the healthy.
This article can be republished under a Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 license. Attributions should include a link to the Democracy Project.
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