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Newsroom.co.nz
Newsroom.co.nz
National
Marc Daalder

Charting New Zealand's vaccine rollout

Immunologist Nikki Turner receives her first vaccine dose in March 2021. Photo: Lynn Grieveson

How many people have been vaccinated in New Zealand? How does that stack up with the rest of the world? Newsroom presents a weekly dashboard of everything you need to know about our country's vaccine rollout.

The key numbers

Cabinet has only authorised one Covid-19 vaccine for use in New Zealand - the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. Two other vaccines, the Janssen and AstraZeneca/Oxford University jabs, have been approved by the medicines regulator Medsafe.

Currently anyone aged 12 or older can book an appointment to be vaccinated at BookMyVaccine.nz. The Pfizer vaccine requires two shots spaced about six weeks apart and is 97 percent effective against severe disease and hospitalisation.

Equity

One of the big focuses of the vaccination campaign has been equity. Māori and Pasifika are less vaccinated than other New Zealanders. This pattern mostly holds even if you break numbers down by age groups.

The rollout has been uneven across different regions of the country, with some District Health Boards vaccinating well ahead of others.

Workforce and supply

At the start of the rollout, there was concern that we wouldn't have enough vaccinators. So far, however, the workforce has held up (with a brief slowdown when nurses were needed for mass testing after the Delta variant was discovered in the community in August). Supply has been the bigger issue, with the country risking running out of doses on a couple of occasions.

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