October 20, 2021
Low Māori vax rates design feature
Waipareira boss John Tamihere says low Māori vaccination rates are a feature of the way the system is designed.
Māori make up 45 percent of cases over the past two weeks, with the majority of new cases being people under 40.
45 percent is also the rate for Māori who are fully vaccinated, compared with a national average of 66.6 percent.
Mr Tamihere says the North Island Whānau Ora Commission Agency had a street level vaccination plan prepared early in the year, but Health Ministry officials refused to listen so providers had to work in a system that put others at the front of the queue.
“We vaccinated over 500,000 Kiwis in our whānau ora network. 94 percent of them were non-Māori. We were forced to vaccinate everybody the system designed us to vaccinate. If we had been able to roll out our own vaccination programmes we would be at 90 percent today as a population. We wouldn’t worry about traffic lights or lockdowns,” he says.
Associate Health Minister Peeni Henare says talks with Māori providers over the past fortnight had identified problems with communication between providers and district health boards he was trying to fix, but he defended Cabinet’s decisions on prioritising Māori.