October 18, 2021
Gang interrogation in Covid safety search
A Māori GP says the gangs are well organised around their vaccine response and keen to see their whānau are protected.
Rawiri McKree Jansen, the co-leader of Māori pandemic response group Urutā, spent much of Super Saturday in pre-arranged question and answer sessions with gangs in Tāmaki Makaurau and Waikato.
He says the organisers had prepared kai packs for the participants to take home, and Ngāti Whātua was at the Auckland session giving out hygiene packs and smoking cessation advice.
“Went to a big area, lots of chairs, everyone had masks on, really well organised, they had a sound system for me, and then they asked questions. They had me for an hour and they were asking everything they wanted to about the vaccine – what’s in it? What’s the side effects? What about me, I’ve got this condition or that? It was a really great day,” he says.
Dr Jansen says the impression in some media that gangs were spreading the virus was untrue, as in fact when the highly infectious Delta variant got into gang whānau the leadership supported health workers to close down those clusters.