The botched $20 million measles vaccine catch-up programme is worse than it appears, National’s Health spokesperson Dr Shane Reti says.
“The other week it was revealed that $8 million of measles vaccines were left unused and had expired.
“However, information shows that only 11,206 people of the targeted 300,000 received the vaccine – representing a cost of nearly $1900 per person and reaching only 3 per cent of the targeted population.
“It was also revealed that Labour spent $1.8 million on public relations to frame a campaign ‘with a particular focus on Maori and Pacific people’, yet only 1181 Maori received the vaccine – a PR cost of $1,500 per person.
“Worse still, to date the programme costs show that $2.2 million has been spent on public relations while only $1.61 million was spent on actually delivering the vaccine to Maori.
“The list of health failures is mounting under Andrew Little’s watch. He failed to deliver any extra ICU beds during a global pandemic, has completely missed every health target set and now he can add a botched measles campaign to his growing list.”