Opposition whip Lynda Tabuya says Fiji should have taken its cue from Australia and delayed the opening of its borders due to uncertainty surrounding the new covid-19 variant omicron.
In her response to last week’s Parliament opening address by President Ratu Wiliame Katonivere, she said “lives are more important than livelihoods”.
The World Health Organisation declared omicron “a variant of concern” on November 26, but said it was “not yet clear” whether it was more transmissible when compared with other variants, and the severity of the disease was uncertain at the present time.
Speaking in Parliament, she said that the last time there was a call for stricter border controls, the government brought in corona’s deadliest strain, the delta variant via a flight from India.
“I, more than anyone, want our hotel workers and the rest of the tourism sector to thrive again — but not at the cost of locking down our beloved country,” she said.
Australia delayed opening borders
“We have just begun to regain some sense of normalcy.
“Australia has just done it. They have been delayed from today (Wednesday) to December 15, Japan has completely shut its borders until further notice.
“Initial reports were that the omicron variant may be less deadlier than the delta variant, but the Australian government isn’t going to put the lives of its citizens at risk and is postponing opening their borders until there is more certainty.”
The outspoken opposition MP said the lives of Fijians were far more important than their livelihoods.
“Why isn’t Fiji doing the same? Our lives are more important than our livelihoods,” she said.
“While Australia has reassured its citizens to remain calm as they look for answers, our government waited on the Nadi airport tarmac today with Rebel Wilson to welcome the world.
“Time and again, this government has shown it cannot keep Fiji safe.”
Luke Naceiis a Fiji Times reporter. Republished with permission.
Ardern confirmed that all of Northland would join the Auckland region in red, along with Taupō, Rotorua Lakes, Kawerau, Whakatāne, Ōpōtiki, Gisborne, Wairoa, Rangitīkei, Whanganui and Ruapehu districts.
“At orange, the big change here for parts of the country which will enter into this setting is that for the vaccinated and where vaccine passes are used, there are no gathering limits,” Ardern said today.
“People can gather again safely. At red, it will feel a lot like level 2. Your vaccine pass lets you go everywhere but number limits of 100 will apply to most activities.”
For Aucklanders, the changes meant they would be able to see family and friends indoors again.
New Zealand’s new North Island traffic light zone system to be introduced on Friday. Image: RNZ
Five of the new cases were in Northland, 167 in Auckland and 10 in Waikato
123 of the new cases were yet to be epidemiologically linked
Five close contacts are self-isolating after a local border case reported yesterday in Canterbury
New omicron variant The world may not learn the true level of the threat posed by the new omicron variant of Covid-19 for several weeks, says a University of Otago scientist.
“I think it’s right to be concerned at this moment, but we need to know more,” he said.
Institute of Environmental Science and Research principal scientist of genomics professor Mike Bunce told RNZ Morning Report the country was well-placed to deal with the new threat but it was important to maintain border protections to “buy us time”.
At the weekend, the government moved nine countries into the very high risk category, restricting travel from those countries to New Zealand citizens only and requiring a full 14 days in MIQ.
There is global concern and widespread alarm at the discovery of SARS-CoV-2 variant B.1.1.529, which the World Health Organisation (WHO) has called omicron.
The WHO classified omicron as a “variant of concern” because it has a wide range of mutations. This suggests vaccines and treatments could be less effective.
Although early days, omicron appears to be able to reinfect people more easily than other strains.
Australia has followed other countries and regions — including the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and the European Union — and banned travellers from nine southern African countries.
Those who have returned from the nine countries – South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho, Eswatini, the Seychelles, Malawi and Mozambique – in the past 14 days will have to isolate.
But Omicron has already been detected in other regions, including the UK, Germany, Israel, Hong Kong and Belgium. So while a travel ban on southern African countries may slow the spread and buy limited time, it’s unlikely to stop it.
As the Australian government and others act to protect their own citizens, this should be accompanied by additional resources to support countries in southern Africa and elsewhere that take prompt action.
When was Omicron detected? The variant was identified on November 22 in South Africa, from a sample collected from a patient on November 9.
South African virologists took prompt action, conferred with colleagues through the Network of Genomic Surveillance in South Africa, liaised with government, and notified the World Health Organisation on November 24.
The behaviour of this new variant is still unclear. Some have claimed the rate of growth of omicron infections, which reflects its transmissibility, may be even higher than those of the delta variant.
This “growth advantage” is yet to be proven but is concerning.
South African officials said the country is being “punished” for detecting the new Omicron variant as more countries rush to enact travel restrictions.
“Excellent science should be applauded and not punished,” the country said in a statement. https://t.co/Yicmn852uv
‘Kneejerk’ response vs WHO recommendations African scientists and politicians have been disappointed in what they see as a “kneejerk” response from countries imposing travel bans. They argue the bans will have significant negative effects for the South African economy, which traditionally welcomes global tourists over the summer year-end period.
They note it is still unclear whether the new variant originated in South Africa, even if it was first identified there. As omicron has already been detected in several other countries, it may already be circulating in regions not included in the travel bans.
Travel bans on countries detecting new variants, and the subsequent economic costs, may also act as a disincentive for countries to reveal variants of concern in future.
The WHO does not generally recommend flight bans or other forms of travel embargoes. Instead, it argues interventions of proven value should be prioritised: vaccination, hand hygiene, physical distancing, well-fitted masks, and good ventilation.
In response to variants of concern, the WHO calls on all countries to enhance surveillance and sequencing, report initial cases or clusters, and undertake investigations to improve understanding of the variant’s behaviour.
WHO warns world leaders against knee-jerk reaction to coronavirus variant from South Africa as U.K. and EU impose travel bans
WHO names new variant omicron, says it’s a variant of concern but there’s a lot we still don’t know.
Wear that face mask, peoplehttps://t.co/XdfnmKdf34
Omicron must be taken seriously. Its features are worrying, but there are large gaps in our current knowledge.
While further analyses are undertaken, the variant should be controlled with testing, tracing, isolation, applying known public health measures, and ongoing surveillance.
What can wealthier countries do to help? Wealthy countries such as Australia should support African nations and others to share early alerts of potentially serious communicable disease threats, and help mitigate these threats.
[…] public health actors only see downsides from drawing attention to an outbreak that has the potential to spread.
The panel recommended creating incentives to reward early response action. This could include support to:
establish research and educational partnerships
strengthen health systems and communicable disease surveillance
greatly improve vaccine availability, distribution, and equity
consider financial compensation, through some form of solidarity fund against pandemic risk.
Boosting vaccine coverage is key Vaccines remain the mainstay of protection against the most severe effects of covid-19.
It is unclear how effective vaccines will be against omicron, but some degree of protection is presumed likely. Pfizer has also indicated it could develop an effective vaccine against a new variant such as Omicron within 100 days or so.
Covid’s persistence is partly attributable to patchy immunisation coverage across many parts of the world, notably those least developed. South Africa itself is better off than most countries on the continent, yet only 24 percent of the adult population are currently fully vaccinated. For the whole of Africa, this drops to only 7.2 percent.
Greater global support is urgently needed to boost these vaccination rates.
African institutions and leaders, supported by global health and vaccine experts, have argued for mRNA vaccine manufacturing facilities on the African continent. These would prioritise regional populations, overcome supply-chain problems, and respond in real time to emerging disease threats.
Yet developing nations face significant barriers to obtaining intellectual property around covid-19 vaccine development and production.
While there is still much to learn about the behaviour and impact of omicron, the global community must demonstrate and commit real support to countries that do the right thing by promptly and transparently sharing information.
Ninety percent of Pacific people in Aotearoa New Zealand have had their first covid-19 vaccine, while 11 district health boards (DHBs) have reached 80 percent first doses for Māori, the Ministry of Health says.
There were a total of 17,899 doses administered yesterday, including 5679 first doses and 12,222 second doses.
To date, 92 percent of eligible people in New Zealand have had their first dose and 85 percent are fully vaccinated.
The ministry said the country’s Pacific communities had reached “some key vaccination milestones”, with 90 percent having officially received their first dose, and 80 percent fully vaccinated.
Eleven of the 21 DHBs had reached 80 percent first doses for Māori, it said in a statement.
The ministry also highlighted how Capital & Coast DHB is just 1131 doses shy of reaching the 90 percent fully vaccinated milestone.
More than 2.1 million My Vaccine Passes have been issued.
Auckland events encourage vaccine uptake This weekend is the last chance New Zealanders have to be fully vaccinated with both injections in time for Christmas.
More than 20 vaccination events were held in Tāmaki Makaurau this weekend, ahead of the Auckland border restrictions easing on December 15.
Tāmaki Makaurau vaccination programme director Matt Hannant said live music, free food and spot prizes were offered at events across the city.
People can also now pre-book to get the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is available from Monday, he said.
The statement said 82 people were in hospital, including nine in intensive care.
Today’s death was a covid-19 patient at North Shore Hospital in their 80s who died yesterday evening.
“Our thoughts are with the patient’s whānau and friends at this deeply sad time,” the statement said.
The ministry said 88 of today’s new cases were yet to be linked.
Today’s new cases included 127 in Auckland, two in Northland, nine in Waikato, four in the Bay of Plenty and the one in Hawke’s Bay reported earlier today which was picked up after a routine hospital swab.
The detection of a new, heavily mutated, and potentially vaccine-resistant coronavirus variant in Botswana and other nations is sending shockwaves worldwide as public health officials rush to understand the strain and its possible impact on the global pandemic response.
For vaccine equity campaigners and epidemiologists, the emergence of another highly contagious coronavirus mutation is far from surprising given the massive inoculation gap between rich and poor countries, which has left billions of people across the globe without access to lifesaving shots — andkept the door open to variants.
Botswana, where the new strain was first identified earlier this month, has fully vaccinated just 20% of its population.
Tim Bierley of the U.K.-based advocacy group Global Justice Now said in a statement that the B.1.1.529 mutation is an “entirely avoidable” consequence of deliberate policy decisions by rich countries, which have hoarded vaccine doses and refused to force pharmaceutical giants to share technology with developing nations.
“The U.K. has actively prevented low and middle-income countries from having equitable access to Covid-19 vaccines. We have created the conditions for this variant to emerge,” Bierley said, referring to the British government’s opposition to a proposed patent waiver for coronavirus vaccines.
“For more than a year, South Africa, Botswana, and most countries have been calling for world leaders to waive intellectual property on coronavirus vaccines, tests, and treatments so they can produce their own jabs,” Bierley noted. “It’s a vital measure that will be discussed at next week’s World Trade Organization conference. But, so far, the U.K. and E.U. have recklessly blocked it from making progress.”
“There have been countless warnings that super-variants could emerge if we do not remove artificial barriers to global vaccination,” he continued. “If and when this new variant starts to tear through the world, remember that the British government has led opposition to the plan that could have stopped it.”
Srinivas Murthy, an infectious disease expert,echoedthat sentiment.
“Allowing new variants to emerge and spread, 13 months into the vaccine era, is a policy choice by the rich world,” he argued.
In marked contrast to their slow-walking of the proposed patent waiver, European countries sprang into action in response to the new variant, moving to imposefresh travel restrictionson visitors from southern Africa as global marketstumbled.
Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission,saidFriday that the body will “propose, in close coordination with member states, to activate the emergency brake to stop air travel from the southern African region due to the variant of concern B.1.1.529.”
“Rich nations are very quick to ban travel but very slow to share vaccines and know-how,”saidMadhu Pai, Canada Research Chair in Epidemiology and Global Health at McGill University.
Dr. Ayoade Alakija, co-chair of the Africa Vaccine Delivery Alliance,tweetedthat the renewed push to cut off travel “was our greatest fear, and [we] were almost prophetic in predicting that the world would eventually shut Africa out having denied us access to vaccines.”
Five quick tweets on the new variant B.1.1.529
Caveat first: data here is *very* preliminary, so everything could change. Nonetheless, better safe than sorry.
1) Based on the data we have, this variant is out-competing others *far* faster than Beta and even Delta did pic.twitter.com/R2Ac4e4N6s
At apress conferenceon Thursday, South African Health Minister Dr. Joe Phaahla said the B.1.1.529 variant — which has thus far been detected in Botswana, South Africa, and Hong Kong — may have been behind recent coronavirus outbreaks in the small South African province of Gauteng. (Update: The first case of the B.1.1.529 variant in Europe wasidentifiedin Belgium on Friday.)
“Rest assured that as people move in the next coming weeks, this [variant] will be all over,” he warned.
Professor Tulio de Oliveira, a renowned bioinformatician, told the media that in the B.1.1.529 variant, “what we see is this very unusual constellation of mutations.”
“This is concerning,” he said, “for predicted immune evasion and transmissibility.”
As Naturereported, “The variant stood out because it contains more than 30 changes to the spike protein — the SARS-CoV-2 protein that recognizes host cells and is the main target of the body’s immune responses.”
“Many of the changes have been found in variants such as Delta and Alpha and are linked to heightened infectivity and the ability to evade infection-blocking antibodies,” the outlet noted.
As COVID-19 has ravaged the U.S., many progressive health care activists and organizations such as National Nurses United have illustrated how the pandemic has only made worse what was already intolerable about our for-profit medical system, and continued to demand universal, publicly financed, single-payer health care. Some on the anti-vax right have instead used the “preexisting conditions” of our health care system to discredit the people and measures which are trying to stop the pandemic, often disingenuously coopting progressive arguments in the process.
The profit-driven nature of our health care system and the pain that it causes the U.S. people have not just galvanized some in support of single-payer, but unfortunately have also helped to seed the ground for the mistrust that cynical political actors have cultivated to make people hostile to public health measures. The following are examples of said cynical political actors doing just that:
Former President Donald Trump has claimed on more than one occasion that doctors and hospitals are part of a conspiracy to enrich themselves by saying patients died of COVID when they actually didn’t.
Conservative activist Candace Owens tweeted: “‘The Covid vaccine saves lives, which is why the government is making it free!’ K. So explain to me why insulin and asthma inhalers cost so much money. If the vaccines are really about the government trying to save your life — why do life-saving medicines cost so much?”
One of the central talking points of the anti-vax movement has been that Big Pharma was involved in inventing or manipulating the pandemic in order to push vaccines to enrich itself.
All of these claims are false, but they appear to some to have validity because they rest at least tangentially on facts: Hospitals and health insurance are too expensive. We are constantly bombarded with horror stories about the ridiculous expenses of medical care: $54,000 for a COVID test, $16,000 for having a baby, $1,000 for an ambulance, and those examples are all just from insured people. Tens of millions have no insurance, and GoFundMe has become the indispensable website for the insured and uninsured alike. Then there is the genre of allegedly heartwarming news stories of people overcoming dystopian reality, like the girl selling lemonade to pay for brain surgery or the high school robotics team constructing a special wheelchair for a little boy when insurance wouldn’t pay for it. As if to put a fine point on the absurdity, just recently a story made the rounds of someone who sat in a local emergency room for hours and left without any treatment, then received a bill for $700.
Adding to this ongoing scam, pharmaceutical companies do their share to bilk patients for their medications. From pharma bros and Sen. Joe Manchin’s daughter jacking up prices on their company’s respective drugs, to something as common as insulin being much more costly in the U.S. than elsewhere, Big Pharma plays a significant role in why our health care system is as expensive and dysfunctional as it is. Its attempts to reap as much profit as possible from the COVID vaccine program, even at the expense of leaving much of the world unvaccinated, do not recommend it, either.
In the face of all this, the government has hung the sick, and ultimately all of us, out to dry. Consider the absurdity of Trump and President Joe Biden, both opponents of single-payer health care, in last year’s campaign endorsing free treatment and vaccines for COVID, while ignoring the financial plight of people suffering from every other disease, ailment and injury, and denouncing efforts to guarantee those people coverage as unworkable and socialistic. As the rest of the developed world has figured out how to provide health care to all their citizens, we still maintain a system in which an estimated 45,000 people die every year from lack of health care, and in which, one study found, 500,000 people cite medical bills as either a primary or contributing cause of bankruptcy annually.
Why? Because hospital, health insurance and pharma corporations each have corrupt, symbiotic relationships with our legislators and regulators which run counter to the general welfare. This has become especially clear as the reconciliation “Build Back Better” bill has been sliced and diced by Senators Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and a select number of House Democrats, all of whom think it’s a bridge too far to make sure seniors can afford their prescriptions, eyeglasses and the teeth in their heads. Follow the money and one finds that this is not primarily an issue of dearly held ideological differences but rather rank corruption and influence-peddling. Sinema has received oodles of cash from the health care and pharma industries, Manchin was a beneficiary of his daughter’s company’s largesse, and Democratic representatives who voted against drug pricing reform have been funded by Big Pharma.
All of this is true, and it’s a sad, infuriating mess, but it does not mean doctors and hospitals are inventing COVID cases. It doesn’t mean vaccines are a scam, and it doesn’t mean the pandemic is either fake or engineered.
The bad faith arguments which the right concocts on these subjects have no need of being coherent. When Trump accuses the doctors and hospitals of inventing COVID cases for money, he doesn’t suggest nationalizing health care like Britain’s National Health Service. When Owens asks why medications are so expensive, she doesn’t endorse Medicare for All. When the anti-vaxxers complain about Big Pharma’s ill-gotten gains, they aren’t out there supporting Sen. Bernie Sanders’s plan to let Medicare negotiate for lower drug prices for seniors. Each of these three potential policy solutions is instead met by these factions with the same standard chorus of “Socialism! Tyranny!”
However false the claims are, however fake the concern, the right has no doubt been effective in how they use the faults of the health care system to attack doctors and civil servants who are charged with protecting the health of the public.
Right-wing ideologues and politicos, though they are some of the main defenders of for-profit health care and beneficiaries of its lucre, are still astute enough to recognize that the system they hail is highly dysfunctional and hurts a lot of people — physically, emotionally and financially. They recognize that the profit motive of the hospital, insurance and pharmaceutical industries creates perverse incentives to maximize private gain at the expense of the public good. They recognize that this situation persists precisely because these industries have incredible control over government health care policy.
They recognize all these problems, but they won’t identify any of them as such to the public, nor do anything to solve them. They merely expose edges of this reality to their followers as it suits their purposes — in this case, to make political hay out of saying the government and Big Pharma are trying to oppress and/or kill you. In so doing, they encourage selfish and self-destructive behavior during a pandemic and let loose a deluge of anger and violence against local, state and federal health officials, doctors, teachers, school boards, store clerks, food service workers and flight attendants.
There are many factors involved in creating this dynamic, but one is no doubt the rapacious nature of our economy as a whole, and of the health care system in particular, which brutalizes the public. This status quo of societal and political indifference to sickness and bankruptcy reinforces the kind of Thomas Hobbesian mentality that the right is trying to instill — “the war of all against all” — as they seek to shred not only the patchwork social safety net, but also just basic norms of civil society, such as taking minimal precautions to protect others. As long as we make health care a commodity rather than a right, the cynical, dishonest arguments that are currently trying to discredit public health officials and measures will only endure: “They didn’t care about you then, what makes you think they care about you now?”
Whereas the right is attempting to scapegoat public health officials for the problems caused by a for-profit system, they are not the ones with the power to make insulin or chemo free at the point of service, like vaccines. It is the politicians who are the ones who need to either be convinced, replaced or circumvented. How do we do this? In some respects, it seems like this issue, as with so many others, is perpetually in the doldrums. Our political system, especially at the federal level, is frozen by legalized bribery and prevented from addressing actual problems in a substantive way. Therefore, the fact that polling shows a majority favor a single-payer system is inconsequential to most of our representatives in an allegedly representative democracy.
Moreover, simply the structure of government in the United States is a unique impediment. Because a party has to control both houses of Congress as well as the presidency at the same time in order to get most things done, most things don’t get done. Even when Democrats do hold this trifecta, there seems to always be a catch. This time it’s Manchin and Sinema, last time it was then-Senators Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson.
To demonstrate the degree to which our system bogs down progress, whereas President Harry Truman started pushing for single-payer at roughly the same time as the United Kingdom, they have had the National Health Service since the late 1940s, but here we are. President Lyndon Johnson was only able to get Medicare and Medicaid through because an inordinate number of liberals were elected to Congress in his 1964 landslide.
Since the advent of Reaganism and the capitulation of the Democratic Party to neoliberalism and privatization, some strides have been made, although they have tended to be more market-based. To wit, both President Barack Obama and Biden ran on the public option, and neither produced it.
This invariably gets into the status of the Democratic Party: Is it the only way to get to the goal, or is it hopelessly compromised by vested interests? That discussion is at least as old as former Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan, and there are valid points all around, but one thing that is certainly necessary is a greater focus on primaries and removing the Democrats who are the most captured by corporate power. If enough who oppose single-payer are removed, others will begin to accept it.
The numbers are there. A significant majority of Democrats favor a Medicare for All system, the exit polling from the 2020 Democratic primaries demonstrates this. But because Biden beat Sanders, the corporate media and establishment party functionaries spun that as the voters agreeing more with Biden’s policy views rather than their impression of his “electability.”
Often it seems that the party is more intent on strangling any social democratic policies than it is on opposing the rise of fascism, but in carrying out the former, they lay the groundwork for the latter. The dynamic described in this article is only one example of such: The precarity to which we expose so many people and the suffering they endure is hastening the rise of authoritarianism. Time was when Democrats understood this, as with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt implementing the New Deal in part as a bulwark against it.
If change at the federal level is a remote possibility, a state-by-state approach is another route. Canada did not adopt universal health care all at once, it started in Saskatchewan after decades of activism on the part of agrarian and labor groups. Creating local and state organizations around single-payer and associated issues is a critical piece of building power and momentum. Doing so around preexisting union, faith and other networks could be especially impactful. As much as voting in the right people is necessary, ultimately there also need to be groups and spaces outside the partisan framework which are issue-oriented and not subservient to a party’s immediate electoral fortunes.
Ballot measures are an especially potent example of this. On issues from raising the minimum wage, to legalizing marijuana, to expanding Medicaid, voters in a wide range of states, including deep red states, have voted for significant progressive change through ballot measures. Organizers in the states that have yet to expand Medicaid are working on this for the 2022 and 2024 elections. This isn’t single-payer, but defending and extending existing public health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid is critical in and of itself and to realizing that eventual goal. Find out what activism is going on in your neighborhood, state or region, and plug in or create the spark yourself.
Much of the work of convincing people on the policy substance has already been done; it is largely a question of translating belief into action. Let’s use progressive arguments for progressive ends.
New Zealand, Australia and other nations in the Pacific need to do more to combat rampant vaccine misinformation in Pacific Island countries, which poses a threat to the whole region, a researcher says.
The Sydney-based Lowy Institute think tank has released projections for when Pacific countries are likely to have vaccinated most of their populations against covid-19.
Lowy researcher Alexandre Dayant said while some Pacific countries have been world-leading in vaccine coverage, others are coming last, and parts of the region now face a humanitarian crisis.
Smaller countries like the Cook Islands, Palau, Nauru and Niue have already achieved majority vaccination thresholds, but other countries lag far behind.
The forecasting shows that even by the start of 2023 there will likely still be a vast chunk of the population unvaccinated in Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands.
Samoa is not expected to have vaccinated everyone 12 years and older until June next year, and Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Kiribati are not expected to achieve full vaccination for those over 18 years old until part-way through 2022.
In Papua New Guinea, only 1.7 percent of the eligible population have been vaccinated so far, and the Lowy report said it could take until 2026 for just one third to be vaccinated.
Misinformation a barrier
Dayant said one of the main issues in PNG and elsewhere in the Pacific is misinformation.
He said that as well as continuing to support the health system in Pacific countries, New Zealand and the international community should help counter the rampant misinformation about vaccines.
Lowy Institute’s Alexandre Dayant … “New Zealand and Australia could help in some ways – dealing with Facebook, seeing what can be done to better control the spread of misinformation on Facebook.” Image: RNZ/Lowy Institute
“New Zealand and Australia could help in some ways – dealing with Facebook, seeing what can be done to better control the spread of misinformation on Facebook. I think this is an issue that Facebook has had to deal with for many years.
“Development partners must continue to partner with local government on their targeted counter-misinformation campaigns and develop a media messaging plan to ensure consistency of messaging about vaccines.”
The report said vaccine supply to Pacific nations was also still an issue, but lack of healthcare workers and difficulties getting to those who need to be vaccinated has created bigger logistical challenges, with many remote and diverse areas.
“How well vaccines are distributed and administered will have significant health, social and economic ramifications in the Pacific,” it said.
The New Zealand Council for International Development’s humanitarian network chair Quenelda Clegg told RNZ that in PNG vaccine hesitancy had become vaccine phobia.
“The situation is dire, people are genuinely afraid of this vaccine … and a critical reason why people are afraid of the vaccine is because of misinformation.
“Misinformation is being spread around the country, and it really is preventing people from going and getting help, and going to the health centres and getting that very crucial vaccine.”
Clegg said that before the arrival of covid-19 previous campaigns to reduce vaccine hesitancy had been successful in the Pacific, and she was hopeful the same could be done again.
ChildFund NZ’s Quenelda Clegg … “Misinformation is being spread around the country, and it really is preventing people from going and getting help.” Image: RNZ/ChildFund.org.nz
“We’ve seen it done in Samoa, which went from a very low vaccine rate with the measles, and now today there’s around 100 percent vaccine take-up in the country — so that’s really positive.
“We also know from a recent study done by the World Bank that when people are receiving accurate messages, and are receiving up-to-date information about the safety of vaccines that actually the general intention to get vaccines goes up by around 50 percent.”
Access to the vaccine in geographically isolated areas, and cultural, economic and educational factors were all contributing to many people missing out in PNG, Clegg said.
New Zealand recently sent a health team to PNG, but if more was not done to help the country, Clegg said “we could see the death rate spiral, the country’s health systems collapse, and even the spread of covid-19 beyond PNG.”
The Council for International Development said New Zealand should donate its spare vaccines to PNG, help provide reliable cell phone coverage so health workers and community leaders there could pass on vaccine information, and fund mobile clinics to provide vaccinations in remote areas.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark says the global handling of the covid-19 pandemic is marred with failures, gaps and delays.
Clark is a co-chair of the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response and is urging nations to spend less time debating commas in committees and instead get on with implementing the panel’s proposed reforms.
These include new financing of at least $10 billion a year for pandemic preparedness, and negotiations on a global pandemic treaty.
Clark told RNZ Morning Report the wheels were in motion on the structural responses the panel had called for but progress was slow.
“The wheels grind slowly but they are grinding,” she said, noting that the World Health Assembly (WHA) would meet for a special session next week and the sole item on the agenda was discussing whether to begin negotiating a treaty aimed at preventing future pandemics.
“I’m quite optimistic that they [the WHA] will embark on negotiations — now what they negotiate is another matter, but the process is kind of under way.”
If the WHA decided to move forward with treaty negotiations it would be only the second global public health treaty, after a 2003 accord to control tobacco use.
“There hasn’t been an equitable supply of tools to fight the pandemic, despite the sincere efforts of many people,” she said.
“We’ve talked a lot about vaccines, but many countries have lacked adequate access to other basics such as diagnostics, therapeutics, personal protective equipment, and even oxygen.”
She told Morning Report the panel had recommended reforms that addressed those inequalities, including dedicated financing for pandemic preparedness and a redesigned “end-to-end” platform that could control the flow of essential medical goods in the event of a future pandemic.
“That’s quite a big ask and in many ways this will be the hardest of all the asks that we had because it does require confronting the current way that the WTO (World Trade Organisation) deals with intellectual property,” Clark said.
The issue of intellectual property rights was already a hot topic, she said, adding that India and South Africa were leading the change in pushing for “the waiver of intellectual property rights in the event of pandemics, including this one”.
More than 257 million people have been reported to be infected by the SARS-CoV2 coronavirus and 5.4 million have died since the first cases were identified in central China in December 2019, according to a Reuters tally.
215 new cases in NZ
in New Zealand, the Ministry of Health reported 215 new community cases and one death, a patient in their 50s At Auckland City Hospital who was admitted to hospital on November 17.
This took the total of deaths to 40 since the pandemic began.
The ministry also said there were 88 people in hospital, including six in intensive care units (ICU).
Of the new cases today, 196 were in Auckland, 11 in Waikato, four in Northland, one in Bay of Plenty, two in Lakes and one in MidCentral that was announced yesterday.
Clark said a key part of “how to do better next time” globally would hinge on reforms required at the WHO itself and admitted the slow progress on deciding what those reforms should be was “frustrating”.
The next regular meeting of the WHO was in late May next year and that would focus on the reform programme, she said.
“While it’s slow and it’s frustrating and we’re coming up, at the end of next month, to the two-year anniversary since what was then a novel coronavirus – which isn’t now so novel – was first identified, the wheels are in motion on these structural responses.”
‘We’re by no means through this’ Clark told Morning Report the newest wave of covid-19 infections in Europe was “largely avoidable” and should serve as a warning to New Zealand not to let its guard down.
“What we’ve seen in … developed countries that are capable of administering a vaccine rollout [is] they then tend to throw out all the other measures,” she said.
She was scathing of images she had seen showing almost no one on the London underground wearing masks: “Can we be surprised that there’s tens of thousands of cases a day?”
She said both the WHO and the panel’s report advocated the ongoing use of public health measures in addition to vaccination.
“Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Don’t be satisfied …
“In New Zealand, when you get to even 90 percent of vaccination of eligible people, don’t throw away the rest of the toolkit because you need it to control transmission among those who aren’t vaccinated,” Clark said.
“It’s a complex story but we’re by no means through this.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Within a few weeks, perhaps before many Americans finish decorating for the holidays, the U.S. could have access to a new antiviral pill from Merck expected to alter the deadly trajectory of the covid-19 pandemic — with a second option from Pfizer to follow shortly after.
Now under federal review, both pills are being hailed by infectious-disease doctors not prone to superlatives.
“This is truly a game changer,” said Dr. Daniel Griffin, an expert on infectious diseases and immunology at Columbia University. “This is up there with vaccines. It’s not a substitute for vaccines; we still want to get people vaccinated. But, boy, this is just another great tool to have.”
The new regimens, which require 30 or 40 pills to be taken over five days, have been shown to dramatically reduce hospitalizations and prevent deaths in adults with mild to moderate covid who are at risk for severe disease because of age or underlying conditions. But experts say the success of the treatments would hinge on one uncertain factor: whether high-risk patients infected with covid will be able to get tested — and then treated — fast enough to make a difference.
“Early, accessible testing and access to the results in a time frame that allows us to make a decision is really going to be key to these medications,” said Dr. Erica Johnson, who chairs the Infectious Disease Board of the American Board of Internal Medicine. “It puts the onus on our public health strategy to make these available.”
In clinical trials, molnupiravir, the antiviral drug developed by Merck & Co. and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, was given to non-hospitalized, unvaccinated, high-risk adult patients within five days of their first covid symptoms. Pfizer’s product, Paxlovid, was tested in similar patients as early as three days — just 72 hours — after symptoms emerged.
Results from the Merck trial, released last month, showed the drug reduced the risk of hospitalizations by about 50% and prevented deaths entirely. It will be considered by an advisory panel to the federal Food and Drug Administration on Nov. 30. Pfizer officials, who requested FDA emergency authorization for their drug on Nov. 16, said Paxlovid cut the risk of hospitalizations and deaths by 89%. Both drugs work by hampering the way the covid virus reproduces, though they do so at different points in the process.
But those promising results assume the drugs can be administered in the narrow window of time used in the trials, a proven challenge when getting antiviral treatments to actual patients. Similar drugs can prevent dire outcomes from influenza if given early, but research shows that only about 40% of high-risk patients during five recent flu seasons sought medical care within three days of falling ill.
“That’s just not human nature,” said Kelly Wroblewski, director of infectious disease programs for the Association of Public Health Laboratories. “If you have a sniffle, you wait to see if it gets worse.”
Even when patients do seek early care, access to covid testing has been wildly variable since the start of the pandemic. U.S. testing capacity continues to be plagued by a host of problems, including supply-chain bottlenecks, staffing shortages, intermittent spikes in demand and results that can take hours — or far longer.
PCR, or polymerase chain reaction tests, the gold standard to detect SARS-CoV-2, can require scheduled appointments at medical offices or urgent care centers, and patients often wait days to learn the results. Rapid antigen tests are faster but less accurate, and some medical providers are hesitant to rely on them. Over-the-counter tests that can be used at home provide results quickly but are hard to find in stores and remain expensive. And it’s not yet clear how those results would be confirmed and whether they would be accepted as a reason for treatment.
“Get ready,” Griffin said. “You don’t want to call someone four days later to say, ‘Ooh, you’re now outside the window,’ and the efficacy of this oral medication has been lost because of problems on our end with getting those results.”
The situation is expected to improve after a Biden administration push to invest $3 billion in rapid testing, including $650 million to ramp up manufacturing capacity for rapid tests. But it could be months before the change is apparent.
“Supplies will be getting better, but it’s going to be slow,” said Mara Aspinall, co-founder of Arizona State University’s biomedical diagnostics program, who writes a weekly newsletter monitoring national testing capacity.
If getting tests will be tough, acquiring doses of the antiviral drugs is expected to be tougher, at least at first. The federal government has agreed to purchase about 3.1 million courses of molnupiravir for $2.2 billion, which works out to about $700 per course of treatment. The Biden administration is planning to announce a deal to pay $5 billion for 10 million courses of the Pfizer drug, paying about $500 per treatment course, according to The Washington Post.
Doses of the drugs distributed by the federal government would go to states and patients at no cost. But only a fraction of the planned inventory will be available to start, said Dr. Lisa Piercey, Tennessee’s health commissioner, who has been part of a small group of state health officials working on the distribution plans.
Under one scenario, in which 100,000 courses of the Merck drug are available as early as Dec. 6, Piercey said Tennessee would receive just 2,000 patient courses even as the state is reporting more than 1,200 new cases a week on average. Deciding which sick patients receive those scarce supplies will be “an educated stab in the dark,” Piercey said.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services officials have said the antiviral treatments will be distributed through the same state-based system adopted for monoclonal antibody treatments. The lab-made molecules, delivered via IV infusion or injection, mimic human antibodies that fight the covid virus and reduce the risk of severe disease and death. Federal officials took over distribution in September, after a covid surge in Southern states with low vaccination rates led to a run on national supplies. They’re now allotted to states based on the number of recent covid cases and hospitalizations and past use.
The antivirals will be cheaper than the monoclonal antibody treatments, which cost the government about $1,250 per dose and can carry infusion fees that leave patients with hundreds of dollars in copays. The pills are much easier to use, and pharmacies likely will be allowed to order and dispense them for home use.
Still, the antiviral pills won’t replace the antibody treatments, said Dr. Brandon Webb, an infectious-disease specialist at Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City.
Questions remain about the long-term safety of the drugs in some populations. Merck’s molnupiravir works by causing mutations that prevent the virus from reproducing. The Pfizer treatment, which includes Paxlovid and a low dose of ritonavir, an HIV antiretroviral, may cause interactions with other drugs or even over-the-counter supplements, Webb said.
Consequently, the antivirals likely won’t be used in children, people with kidney or liver disease, or pregnant people. They’ll need to be administered to patients capable of taking multiple pills at once, a couple of times a day, and those patients should be monitored to make sure they complete the therapy.
“We’ll be on an interesting tightrope in which we’ll be trying to identify eligible patients early on to treat them with antivirals,” Webb said. “We’re just going to need to be nimble and ready to pivot.”
Kaiser Health News, a nonprofit health newsroom whose stories appear in news outlets nationwide, is an editorially independent part of the Kaiser Family Foundation.
“And while no country to date has been able to eliminate delta completely once it’s arrived, New Zealand is better positioned than most to tackle it because of our high vaccination rates and the inbuilt safety measures in the traffic light system like vaccine passes.”
Ardern said the most important thing to communicate about the traffic light system was “for the most part, if you’re vaccinated, you can go about doing all the kinds of things you’d usually expect … what varies is just how large those gatherings are at different levels”.
A statement said Counties Manukau Health reported the death of a man in his 40s at Middlemore Hospital.
Of the new cases, 175 were in Auckland, 20 in Waikato, five in Bay of Plenty, one in Taupō and four in Northland.
Vaccine levels would play a key determining factor for which regions go into red and which go into orange, Ardern said.
“We will look at … vaccine rates, we will look at case rates, and that will be the major determining factor but we’ll also be pragmatic. So you know, a good indication is if you’ve hit 90 percent first dose is a good indication of where you’re heading.”
Legal requirements Cabinet decided on the December 3 date (the first full day of the traffic light system) today, which allowed for the legal requirements in getting the system set up, Ardern said.
Legislation would be introduced and passed this week to enable that, Ardern said.
Watch the media briefing
Video: RNZ News
She disagreed with the idea that the traffic light system legislation was being rushed through under urgency.
“The covid protection framework has been publicly available and able to be discussed, debated and considered since October. The very opposition who are choosing to criticise us also have been asking us of course to just move arbitrarily,” she said.
“And of course we’ve got a process here where there’s able to debate on the framework but ultimately decisions about when we move have been based on the health situation.”
The government will provide extra guidance for businesses to prepare. An assessment toolkit will be released for those businesses wanting to require their staff to be vaccinated.
Tomorrow, the verifier app for businesses that require proof of the vaccine pass for entry will be launched.
Businesses will not be required to use it, but it will be useful, she said.
Guidance for businesses
Guidance this week will also set out how businesses can operate safely under the traffic light system.
One area where the government will be putting out sector-specific guidance was for schools, because they had large numbers of unvaccinated children, and parents who needed to supervise them.
Sector-specific guidance will also be made available for local government outdoor events where there are no specific entry and exit points.
From this Thursday, hairdressers and barbers in Auckland will be able to open if they require proof of vaccination from customers.
This will operate as a trial period for the vaccine passes. The hairdressers and barbers will need to:
Operate with passes
Take bookings only (no walk-ins)
Staff must be fully vaccinated
Using alert level 2 settings – staff wearing masks and 1m distancing between chairs
Ardern said the decision to allow hairdressers to open but not hospitality was because it was a group where the numbers are smaller and more confined, which allowed the vaccine pass system to be safely tested.
Outside dining?
Asked about the possibility of hospitality opening up for outside dining, Ardern said one of the issues was there was no simple legislative fix that would allow more venues to legally be able to hold al fresco dining. She said hairdressers were probably the lowest risk sector that would be able to operate.
Some 83 percent of eligible New Zealanders are fully vaccinated. Ardern said that if all those people who were now overdue for their second shot got it today, that number would rise to 88 percent fully vaccinated.
So far 1.2 million people had downloaded their vaccine pass, and Ardern urged those who had not yet done so to get in now.
Ardern said when the government considered alert levels 29 November 29, it will be considering regions’ likely status over summer as well as their vaccination rates.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The covid protest outside Parliament earlier this month served as a warning that Aotearoa New Zealand is not immune to the kinds of anger seen overseas. As Labour Party whip Kieran McAnulty put it, “I think everyone needs to be aware that things are starting to escalate.”
McAnulty himself had been abused by some with strong anti-vaccination views, and there has been increasingly violent rhetoric directed at government politicians and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
As a result, security for MPs has been stepped up.
As the recent report from research centre Te Pūnaha Matatini showed, there has been a sharp increase in the “popularity and intensity of covid-19 specific disinformation and other forms of ‘dangerous speech’ and disinformation, related to far-right ideologies”.
The analysis noted a broader threat: “That covid-19 and vaccination are being used as a kind of Trojan Horse for norm-setting and norm-entrenchment of far-right ideologies in Aotearoa New Zealand.”
Terror threat: medium Last year, New Zealand’s Security Intelligence Service (SIS) warned of the “realistic possibility” that continued covid restrictions or further vaccination requirements could trigger an act of violent extremism.
The country is not alone in this, of course. Covid-19 has seen dissent and angry protest rise globally, with inevitable concern over an increased risk of terrorism or violent extremism.
Right now, New Zealand’s official terror threat level is assessed as “medium”, meaning an attack is deemed “feasible and could well occur”.
By contrast, Australia’s threat level is set at “probable” and Britain’s at “severe”. According to its Department of Homeland Security, the US “continues to face a diverse and challenging threat environment as it approaches several religious holidays and associated mass gatherings”.
Riot police were deployed in Melbourne in September when protests over mandatory vaccination for construction workers turned violent. Image: The Conversation/GettyImages
The lone actor problem An SIS terrorism threat assessment from February this year, coupled with a “Threat Insight” from the Combined Threat Assessment Group in November 2020, divided potential terrorists in New Zealand into three groups based on faith, identity and politics. What they share is a willingness to use violence to achieve their goals.
The most likely scenario involves a lone actor, inspired by any ideology and probably using an unsophisticated means of attack, without any intelligence warning. However, a small anti-government cell was also considered a realistic possibility.
The SIS assessment noted there are almost certainly individuals who advocate the use of violence to promote racial or ethnic identity beliefs, as well as individuals potentially prone to faith-based violent extremism. As for politically motivated actors, the SIS was more reassuring:
While some individuals and groups have lawfully advocated for signicant change to current political and social systems, there continues to be little indication of any serious intent to engage in violence to acheive that change.
The February report is heavily redacted, so needs to be placed next to the November “Threat Insight”. That report noted a “realistic possibility” of terrorist acts depending on how Covid-19 and the associated economic and social impacts unfolded, and how individual extremists might be affected. It concluded:
The situation in New Zealand over the next 12 months is likely to remain dynamic. There is a realistic possibility further restrictions or potential vaccination programmes […] could be triggers for New Zealand-based violent extremists to conduct an act of terrorist violence.
Still a peaceful place?
If there is any comfort to take, it might be that New Zealand has risen in the 2021 Global Peace Index, putting the country second only to Iceland.
This represents a return to relative normality after the 2019 Christchurch terror attack saw New Zealand drop 79 places in the Global Terrorism Index in 2020 (ranking 42nd, just behind Russia, Israel and South Africa).
There has also been an increase in firearms injuries, many (but not all) gang-related. Figures released under the Official Information Act show the police are facing increased risks: between March 2019 and July 2021, officers had firearms pointed or discharged at them 46 times.
New Zealanders can have some faith the system, however. Two potential shooting events, one involving a school, were foiled by police. The New Lynn extremist was already subject to monitoring so tight he was shot within 60 seconds of launching his attack.
Security intelligence also detected espionage in the military, and was instrumental in New Zealand Cricket calling off its tour of Pakistan due to a plausible terror threat.
A ‘see something, say something’ culture All of this underscores the need for everyone to do what they can to combat alienation and misinformation in the community, anchored by tolerance, respect and civil behaviour. And it also requires that people be prepared to report acts of suspicious activity or threats of violence (online or not).
As the Royal Commission on the Christchurch terror attacks noted, the likeliest thing to have prevented the tragedy would have been a “see something, say something” culture — one where people could safely raise their concerns with the appropriate authorities.
“Such reporting,” the commission concluded, “would have provided the best chance of disrupting the terrorist attack.”
As the pandemic stretches into the next year, with likely ongoing restrictions and unforeseeable complications, this remarkable sentence is worth remembering. It suggests the best defence against extremism is to be found within ourselves, and in the robust and safe communities we must create.
“The spread of covid-19 cases to regions throughout New Zealand is a reminder that everyone needs to heed the advice that will help keep our communities as safe as possible,” the statement said.
“That includes ensuring you and your loved ones are fully vaccinated if eligible, get tested even if you have only mild symptoms, wear a mask, keep a safe distance from people outside your bubble, and keep track of your movements outside your home.”
The ministry said this afternoon that the the person was relocating from Auckland and advised to isolate in Hawke’s Bay after the positive result was returned. The case is currently isolating safely and remains well.
Contacts tested negative
Contacts have so far tested negative for covid-19.
The Bay of Plenty case reported today is in Tauranga and is a contact of a known cluster, while four of the six new cases in Waikato are linked to earlier cases.
The ministry said the Christchurch case was an initial weak positive result and was being further investigated. The case recently travelled to the North Island, and was linked to another case in the Lower North Island.
There were no further cases reported in the Wellington region today.
The ministry said 84 of today’s 149 new cases were yet to be linked.
There have now been 6850 cases in the current community outbreak and 9608 cases of the coronavirus in New Zealand since the pandemic began.
21,501 vaccine doses
There were 21,501 vaccine doses given yesterday — 6002 first doses and 15,499 second doses.
The ministry said 91 percent of eligible people in New Zealand had now had their first dose and 83 percent were fully vaccinated.
It said 12 district health boards (DHBs) had now reached the 90 percent first dose vaccination milestone, with South Canterbury the latest area to achieve it.
More than one million people had now downloaded their My Vaccine Pass.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Janine Jackson: The front-page November 10 New York Times told us, “Moderna Moves for Total Credit in Vaccine Patent; Won’t Share With US.” It’s an odd thing to read, but corporate news media often present readers with linguistic juxtapositions that accurately, if unwittingly, reflect deep questions about US society.
In this case, it’s the fact that a private company is seeking to deny the involvement of the NIH in inventing the main component of its Covid-19 vaccine, with, as the paper notes, “broad implications for the vaccine’s long-term distribution and billions of dollars in future profits.”
It’s nice that the vaccine’s lifesaving capacity comes first in the phrase, before the billions to be made. But is that the priority of the process at work here?
Joining us now by phone is Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Global Access to Medicines Program. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Peter Maybarduk.
Peter Maybarduk:It’s great to be back.
JJ: Very simply, what is Moderna claiming it did, and how does that comport with your understanding of the invention of this vaccine?
PM:Moderna says that it independently designed the sequence used in the NIH/Moderna vaccine, what we might think of as the vaccine itself. The National Institutes of Health says that it sent over a sequence which Moderna plugged into its process. So it is a technical dispute regarding, essentially, authorship of the vaccine.
Now, what’s not in dispute is that the National Institutes of Health and Moderna have been partners in this process for several years. And it’s important but often overlooked: The National Institutes of Health are the world’s leading funder of biomedical research, with about $40 billion taxpayer dollars invested every year in products that are eventually sold, largely under monopoly conditions, by the pharmaceutical industry.
In this case, federal scientists pioneered research into coronaviruses long before Covid-19. You recall that we had SARS and MERS, and were aware that there was a coronavirus threat, and it was the federal government that pushed much of that research ahead, and also played a role helping pioneer the various vaccine platforms, including MRNA, which has proved so effective.
So in this case, we have a dispute over who is the inventor of the core patent at the heart of the world’s most effective Covid-19 vaccine. And NIH and Moderna just don’t agree. And we are now starting to get rumblings out of NIH that perhaps they will take this to the next level, and seek a legal resolution. What we understand is that the company and the US government have been fighting about this behind closed doors for a year now.
JJ: What is the meaningful impact? What would it, for instance, limit the US government from doing if Moderna gets sole credit for invention here? And what would it allow Moderna to do?
PM:If the US government is a co-inventor, it has more formal power, as well as more informal leverage, to insist on certain uses of the vaccine, to license the technology to more manufacturers worldwide, to help scale up production, for example. Or, and to your initial point, to insist on royalty payments to the government in exchange for Moderna’s use of some of this publicly funded technology.
The truth of the matter is that the NIH and the US government actually have broader powers than just what are in this patent. And we believe and havesaid all alongthat the US government, under its contract with Moderna, or under theDefense Production Actand theBayh/Dole Act, and other powers under existing law, has the power to share key vaccine information, license other producers, perhaps simply share the entire NIH/ Moderna vaccine recipe with the World Health Organization, to see production scaled up and this key invention made available to all the world’s people, who so desperately need it.
But there’s no doubt that, in reputational terms, in terms of the story that is told, potentially in terms of dollars, the issue of who really invented the vaccine just has great salience and implications for what kinds of decisions the government makes about that power that we believe it has.
One of the greatest public health private/profit tensions in this story is the value of “vaccine recipes” and vaccine technology. A company like Moderna isn’t thinking only about the value of its MRNA vaccine–which is actually [you noted] is actually an NIH, a publicly developed vaccine, in partnership with Moderna, paid for by taxpayers over many years already. But they’re thinking about the value of future products.
Which is just my way of saying, I don’t imagine that this twist in the story comes as a complete surprise to you.
PM:That’s right. We’ve been tracking it for some time, and of course the US government and Moderna have been fighting about it for some time.
You know, worldwide, more than 10 million people so far have died as a result of the pandemic. And a core issue there is that there have not been enough vaccines to go around. And NIH/Moderna is the people’s vaccine, or should be the people’s vaccine–publicly funded, publicly pioneered, public science leading the way, and even running the clinical trials. Taxpayers paid for 99% of this vaccine’s development.
But Moderna is trying to turn this people’s vaccine into a rich people’s vaccine. It has been available primarily to wealthy countries, very few doses going toCOVAXor to the global relief effort, and the technology not being shared with the World Health Organization, or others that could build on it.
So that’s what’s at stake, and from the beginning of the pandemic, unfortunately, the US government’s position has been to be extremely deferential to corporate interests, rather than noting the scale of the crisis, and noting the government’s own involvement, and saying, you know what? We are co-owners of this vaccine, and we shall make it available to the world, because the crisis calls for that.
Our position always has been that the US government can compensate Moderna for its investment and its scientific engagements, but that we should not allow, that humanity cannot afford, for such an important medical tool to be held corporate confidential, and limited in its rollout at this time.
JJ: This is, I guess, another point on that question. I do believe that for most people, protection from a fatal disease is not seen as like having a fancy car, you know: if you can’t afford it, you just go without it. So it brings us back to an underlying question of private resourcing of public health.
And the news coverage on this latest twist has had a sort of subtheme of, this is so sad because the private/public partnership on vaccines was like the holy grail, and now it’s getting kind of messed up. TheNew York Timescalled it “one of the few bright spots of the pandemic.” And I get that. But I also hear, like, God forbid the state just do a thing on its own in the public interest, you know? Because that would mean government worked, and we can’t have that.
And so the problem is being defined, for those who think there’s a problem, as Moderna might get these billions, but if the US got some of these billions, it would go to the Treasury. And the vision that calls up is drugs, lifesaving drugs are a pot of gold, and private companies and governments are fighting over it. And that whole vision seems kind of effed up to me, as a way to resource public health.
PM:Certainly more important is the government’s responsibility for stewarding the technology that it is helping develop, for one. But also, even if the government hadn’t developed this technology, simply recognizing the role of the world’s most powerful government in a time of global crisis–if it were war, we would treat the technology differently. We would not allow any company’s particular rights or investments to prevent us from developing the best defense technologies. So should it be in health. But we aren’t there yet, politically, and it’s a corner that we desperately need to turn, because so many people, of course, are dying in this case.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Peter Maybarduk. He’s director of the Global Access to Medicines Program at Public Citizen. You can find them online at citizen.org. Peter Maybarduk, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
As New Zealand readies for more covid-19 cases, warnings about the ability of public hospitals to cope are escalating.
There are 289 intensive care unit (ICU) or high dependency unit (HDU) beds at the moment, with Minister of Health Andrew Little insisting that could be ramped up to 550 if needed.
But that has been roundly questioned by opposition MPs, clinicians and ICU experts, including a recent New Zealand Medical Journalarticle concluding fully staffed, extra capacity would be more like 67 beds.
It describes New Zealand’s “comparatively low ICU capacity” as a “potential point of vulnerability” in the covid-19 response.
Intensive care There is a reason it is called intensive care.
Patients there are so sick, each one has a nurse with them around the clock.
Those there because of covid-19 are usually struggling to breathe, their lungs unable to give their body all the oxygen it needs to function.
There are doctors, physios, pharmacists who come and go to give vital care but it is the nurses who are the constant.
That’s why the shortage of ICU nurses is at the heart of the debate.
New Zealand’s intensive care was already in a perilous position long before covid-19, with one of the lowest number of beds per capita in the developed world.
Doctors and nurses have been asking for help for 10 years, failing to make meaningful traction with successive governments.
The small community pulled together, pooled resources, when crises like the White Island eruption and the mass shooting in Christchurch hit.
But covid-19 is different. It is here for longer and will hit everywhere.
Political football Little is “assured that we will manage and we will cope”.
High vaccination rates will mean fewer people will actually end up in hospital and “the vast majority who then get infected will be able to be cared for in the home with appropriate sort of monitoring, the stuff we’re putting in place at the moment”, he says.
He acknowledges any move to surge up would mean deferred operations for things like hip and knee replacements, and people needing a lower level of care getting it somewhere other than a hospital.
“The impact will be on non-covid patients who can be safely referred to other places for their care and recovery at the hospital.”
Minister of Health Andrew Little … “assured that we will manage and we will cope”. Image: Dom Thomas/RNZ
National Party MP Shane Reti says there are simply not enough specialist ICU nurses.
“Five point three nurses [needed per ICU] bed, it’s orphaned out and what we know from specialists … is that instead of the hundreds of beds that Andrew says we’ve got we’ve probably only got about 67 to surge to.”
Not wanting to sound like a “political caricature”, Little, however, lays the blame at the feet of the previous National government.
Heath underfunded
“Our ICU capacity – if we’re talking about just designated ICU wards, and ICU beds, yep, that’s been a long standing problem … the reality is health has been underfunded for a long time, particularly when it comes to health facilities and buildings,” he says.
He is confident any outbreak can be managed, saying expanding to 500 or so beds would require an increase to about 200,000 covid-19 patients across the country.
However, Reti says that the May 5 public sector pay freeze has impacted on staffing, with some going to Australia, and that New Zealand’s now competing with the world for ICU nurses with an immigration system that’s not friendly to them.
National Party MP Shane Reti … May 5 public sector pay freeze has impacted on staffing. Image: Dom Thomas/RNZ
Nursing shortage Even with the known nursing vacancies, New Zealand’s needs could be met with the training of about 1400 more nurses to work in ICU under supervision, Little says.
Through May 2020 till mid August this year, there were no new, resourced ICU beds in Auckland DHB, but the ICU nurse headcount dropped from about 250 to just over 212.
Reti says the nursing shortage is a major obstacle.
“When Minister Little says, ‘I’ve trained up 1400 ICU nurses’ — no you haven’t, what you’ve done is you’ve given them half a day’s online training and half a day on a mannequin.
“In no shape or form is that an ICU nurse — they’ll be valuable, don’t get me wrong — but valuable for turning patients in ICU?”
Auckland has the biggest ICU unit in the country, and needed to find nurses from across New Zealand on September 1 when eight active cases arrived there, he says, showing just how thin the margins are.
On the ground Vice-president of the Australasian College of Intensive Care Rob Bevan says right now intensive care is coping well.
That is due, in large part, to high — and rising — vaccination rates and the fact that Auckland’s been in lockdown.
Quieter lives mean fewer car accident and workplace falls, while hospitals have delayed many of the planned operations which might involve ICU recovery.
But Dr Bevan, a specialist at Auckland’s Middlemore Hospital, says more beds will be needed next year when covid-19 is in the community and life was comparatively back to normal.
“There is going to be a burden of covid that people will need hospitalisation and intensive care for that we need to add onto what we were doing before,” he says.
“And acknowledging that our intensive care bed capacity before was still not enough to care for everybody without resorting to the deferment of planned care on occasion.”
Many who work in intensive care say the government and health bosses are wrong to count physical beds (and the equipment that comes with them) when there are not enough nurses to use them all.
Shocked by ‘training’
When they said they were training other nurses to help in ICU, the nurses organisation kaiwhakahaere Kerri Nuku said she was shocked to learn what that meant.
“Four hours online training — to go and support in ICU. Those decisions about what’s in the best interests of nursing have not been made for nurses,” she said.
Indeed, specialist ICU nurses say they would have to spend time supervising the online trained back-ups, adding more work to an already very challenging job.
And Bevan says surging up to more than 500 beds is not a realistic picture.
“That is a crisis, short term, and largely unsustainable model that we would have had to have moved to had we been overwhelmed like they have been in other parts of the world,” he says.
“But that would most likely achieve worse outcomes for all patients in ICU than they have in other parts of the world compared with our best model of care that we’ve been able to provide to date.”
The message is starting to get through to those who made decisions, he says.
Intensive care meetings
Intensive care bodies are meeting with the Ministry of Health twice a week and there is work underway to try to recruit more nurses from overseas, he says.
But it has to go beyond talk and into action, first to sort the short term problem but then to keep building on that over the next several years.
“The next pandemic is inevitable … it might be in 10 years, it might be in 100 years, but it is coming,” Bevan says.
Little says he has also asked for decisions on three DHBs proposals expanding ICU capacity to be “accelerated”, but even then, those “will be some months away — they won’t be instant”.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
A New Zealand emergency medical specialist has written about their experience working at an Auckland hospital, issuing a warning ahead of yesterday’s Auckland border announcement.
Auckland’s border will reopen on December 15 for fully-vaccinated travellers or those who test negative for covid-19 within 72 hours of departure.
I head into my shift in charge as an Emergency Medicine Specialist. I park and walk past the ambulance bay, noting all the ambulances parked, I speak with some tired but cheerful paramedics even though it has been 30 minutes since they arrived with their patient — the triage nurse hasn’t got to them yet.
I see my colleagues, busy caring for patients, contacting specialties, arranging tests, performing procedures, talking with families. I see police lining the corridor. I call for security when I hear someone screaming profanities at one of our nurses. I note that our isolation rooms are already full.
I see that we have one resuscitation room available, the rest are already full. There are three people mentally unwell who need care in a mental health unit, one of who is suicidal and has been in the busy and bright emergency department for over a day.
There is no room available in any mental health unit in Auckland. We try our very best to provide them with care, but we are not a mental health inpatient unit. There are multiple patients waiting for admission to a ward; I am told that no beds will be available until the next morning. The charge nurse and I sigh. Another evening of balancing emergency care with providing ward care to those we’ve already seen and admitted with hardly any room in the emergency department. The nurses bear the brunt of this burden.
That was in early August, before the current outbreak.
Now, I head into my shift in charge as an Emergency Medicine Specialist. Before I’ve left [home] I have to shave so the N95 mask seals. I ready a box for my clothes (when I get home I strip naked before entering and beeline to the shower, I don’t want to infect my family).
The ambulance bay is packed. Everyone is in PPE, I can’t recognise people. The paramedics look tired. I don my N95 mask, check the seal and enter the department. Inside, all my colleagues are in full PPE. I see all the negative pressure isolation rooms are already full. The pregnant patients wait alongside the suicidal patients and the elderly breathless patients.
I am told the hospital has run out of negative pressure rooms on the ward, but that one might be freed up in an hour. There is no plan in place for what to do if there are no negative pressure rooms available.
The charge nurse and I make one up. It is not ideal and has some risk. We inform management of the situation, but they can’t magic up new wards. A call from microbiology, “another covid positive result”. I quickly confirm that the patient is in a negative pressure room rather than in our makeshift four bedded very unlikely but theoretically possible covid space. They are. A relief — I would feel responsible for causing extra infections.
I hear security being called. I walk behind them and see someone in a negative pressure room throwing medical equipment around the room. They are covid positive and are thought to be high on methamphetamine. We can’t calm them down, the situation escalates. The security guards have to restrain them, risking covid infection.
A covid outbreak brings so many new incremental tasks and barriers to care and the new addition of significantly increased risk to the personal health and wellbeing of healthcare providers and patients. Paramedics, nurses, health care assistants, doctors, security and cleaners take an extra 3 minutes to don and doff PPE for every interaction.
If I interact with 20 patients during an in-charge shift – that’s an hour of the shift that I am spending donning and doffing PPE that I could be using to provide care. Rooms need extra cleaning. Wards want to wait for negative covid swabs before admitting people even though they aren’t supposed to — I get it, they don’t want to be infected either.
Our Emergency Department is more and more frequently overflowing. Ambulances might wait over 30 minutes to transfer their patients to our care leaving them unavailable for 111 dispatches. People can wait half a day for an ambulance transfer between hospitals — there are none available.
We hear a lot about ICU beds. It is absolutely true that we have half the number we should have even in the absence of a pandemic. But this issue is only one part of the problem.
If the number of unvaccinated covid cases increases significantly the problem will be that the entire health system will be overwhelmed — what will that look like?
How many ambulances, emergency department rooms, and ward rooms will there be, and, crucially, will there be enough healthcare workers?
When wards and EDs are full, ambulances cannot hand over care of their acutely unwell patients and so they wait in the ambulance bay for hours and days. When that happens, there will be no ambulances available. When an ambulance is called for my friend’s baby that is born early at home, for my uncle’s chest pain, for my cousin’s car crash, for my grandmother’s fall, my child’s nut allergy or my neighbour’s child with asthma — they may be queued at the hospital ambulance bay and unable to attend.
When wards are full, patients wait in the ED and when the ED is full, they wait in the waiting room and the corridors.
This is in Auckland, where there are more ambulances, more ED beds and more ward beds than Whanganui, or Taupō, or Greymouth.
Everyone has their reasons for or against the vaccine. These are my reasons for the vaccine:
Vaccination decreases the rate of infection and therefore decreases the number of people who become unwell with covid.
The Pfizer vaccine provides around 95 percent protection from symptomatic viral infection after two doses, which means 95 people out of 100 exposed to the virus will not develop symptomatic covid. Face coverings and social distancing help to further decrease the risk of infection on exposure. As there is active community transmission, we are all exposed.
Those vaccinated individuals who do become infected have very mild symptoms and so are less likely to pass it on. Fully immunised individuals rarely become unwell enough to require hospital level care, so they rarely need to come to hospital. This then decreases the risk of infection for health care workers.
Every infection in a health care worker has flow-on effects, it is at least 10 patients per shift per clinician that have to be cared for by someone else in the place I work.
As the cases in the community grow, and contact tracing struggles to keep up, more cases become infectious in the community. The capacity to follow-up patients with Healthline also becomes exceeded while GPs are taking on more care for covid patients in the community.
GP practices are already overloaded, and people with chronic disease may not be able to get timely care or may feel uncomfortable seeking care — becoming acutely unwell as a result, needing hospital care.
Except when they need it there may be no bed for them, and, no ambulance.
That is a health system overwhelmed.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Of today’s official cases, 197 cases are in Auckland, 20 are in Waikato, two are in Taupō, two are in Wairarapa, and one is in Northland.
Public health officials said they were investigating a common link between cases reported in Taupō, Tararua and Masterton.
Patient in 70s dies In a statement this afternoon, the ministry confirmed a patient in her late 70s had died at Auckland City Hospital after she was admitted on November 11 and had subsequently tested positive for the virus.
This takes the total of deaths from covid-19 in New Zealand to 35.
Public health staff in Auckland are now supporting 4416 people to isolate at home around Auckland. This includes 2023 covid-19 cases.
There are 18 community testing centres available across Auckland today.
The ministry said 21 residents and four staff members of Edmonton Meadows Care Home in Henderson had tested positive since the start of the outbreak.
Five residents who tested positive are receiving appropriate ward-level care at Auckland hospitals, it added.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
They had a last minute meeting with the district health board (DHB) yesterday, one of a series over the past few weeks.
“People have been given the opportunity to think about it, respond, have some time, offered more information,” he said.
Even though they could not work from today, they would have one more meeting this week, a chance to change their minds before their contracts were terminated, he said.
Other DHBs also met with workers yesterday, with most offering the chance for last minute vaccinations.
Numbers unclear
It was still unclear how many people have made the same choice as the Waikato orderlies.
A spokesperson representing all district health boards said at 9am yesterday they estimated there were about 2 percent or 3 percent of their 80,000 staff nationally who were unvaccinated — between 1600 and 2400 people.
But it would be a few days before they knew the final number, she said.
That estimate did not count the tens of thousands of contractors who worked at hospitals, doing jobs like carpentry, food preparation or patient transport.
Counties Manukau DHB managers have been told they are responsible for checking every contractor who is coming on site to do work for their team.
The mandate went beyond DHBs to people working in the community – GPs, physiotherapists, psychologists, midwives, chiropractors and more.
The College of GPs medical director Dr Bryan Betty said it was also trying to get a gauge on how many of the country’s 5000 GPs were not vaccinated.
He knew of about 20, but also of nurses and receptionists who would lose their jobs.
Awaiting DHB figures
Nurse and midwife organisations were also waiting on DHB figures to find out how their professions were impacted.
Nurses Organisation Kaiwhakahaere Kerri Nuku said there was a small number out of the roughly 50,000 nurses working around the country.
She knew personally of six who were still holding out but also of some who had been reluctant then realised their jobs were more important and got vaccinated.
College of Midwives chief executive Alison Eddy said she worried about losing any midwife from the workforce, because it was already so stretched.
Hehir said the union was supporting its workers but it did back the mandate.
When it surveyed its DHB workers, for every vaccine hesitant response, there were many more from those who said they would be uncomfortable working with unvaccinated people.
“It is a real serious issue with people losing their jobs but it is also a very serious issue for people concerned about their health and the health of their families,” he said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
A Northland high school principal says she has been accused of being “complicit in mass genocide” by people opposed to getting vaccinated.
After today, anyone who works or volunteers in an education setting in New Zealand and who has not received at least one dose of the covid-19 vaccine will be barred from school grounds.
Last week, thousands of people marched up the streets of Wellington to Parliament to protest for various covid-19-related reasons.
Some were angry at the covid-19 vaccination mandates, the lockdowns or the vaccine itself.
The protesters screamed abuse at police and media, demanding an end to covid-19 restrictions.
This level of anger is all too familiar for Whangārei Boys High School principal Karen Gilbert-Smith.
“I appreciate that what’s happening for a lot of people is really challenging, but the kind of things that have been happening from my end, and I know speaking to other colleagues, they’re experiencing similar things, is relentlessness that we’re doing something to others,” Gilbert-Smith said.
‘Worst message’
“I think the worst message that I got was that I was complicit in mass genocide by supporting the vaccination mandate,” she said.
“We get a lot of emails from parents: the vast majority of those are positive, but the ones that kind of take the wind out of your sails and that require the most thoughtful response are the ones that are really awful and vindictive.”
The abuse was coming from all angles and although it was a minority, their voices were loud, Gilbert-Smith said.
“I think it’s the ill-informed or misinformed anti-vaxxers that are really whipping up that hatred. That just feels really abhorrent to me that misinformation just gets so widely spread and is leading to that sense of lack of safety for people in their communities.”
Teachers need to have received at least one dose of the covid-19 vaccine if they want to continue to work with students in a face-to-face learning environment.
‘Where are we going to find those replacements?’ Gilbert-Smith preferred not to comment on their own staffing situation at Whangārei Boys High School, but did say she was nervous.
“As principals, many of us have had conversations about the impact in our own schools and certainly in Te Tai Tokerau, it’s likely to have a significant impact on staffing across our schools, so we’re not just talking about teachers,” she said.
“We’re talking about groundsmen, canteen staff, support staff, everyone. We can ill afford to have staffing shortages and in Tai Tokerau it’s difficult enough.”
She is concerned that it will impact on students.
“It’s hard enough to put well qualified, passionate, knowledgeable, smart teachers in front of students, which is what they deserve. And now we’re in a situation of being a little bit further behind than that.
“Where are we going to find those replacements? Particularly teachers. That is very worrying to me.”
She said the constant hate and abuse was wearing her down and was making it harder for her to do her job.
‘Creating reassurance’
“Principals are creating reassurance for everyone in their community, but also fielding all the negativity that comes. Anyone with aspirations of being a principal right now, they might be reconsidering at this point,” she said.
“We are obliged to uphold the law, and that’s what we’re doing as principals, and we’re doing the best that we can. We’re managing people’s expectations and we’re dealing with their upset and distress.
“And keeping the school running as we’re supposed to do on any other day of the week, or any other time of the year. It is a lot of work.”
Gilbert-Smith said she loved her job, but the current conversations had moved too far away from being about creating better outcomes for young people in Aotearoa.
“That’s a real shame because they are the ones that will suffer, those young people in our schools.”
The impact of the vaccine mandate on teacher supply will not be known until the vaccination deadline has passed and numbers are clear, according to the Ministry of Health.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
An epidemiologist says New Zealand’s record high covid-19 case numbers today and the spread across the North Island are a reminder that the whole country needs to be on the lookout for the virus.
Dr Siouxsie Wiles of the University of Auckland said the 207 community cases today – just above the previous record high of 206 cases on November 6 — were disappointing but not surprising, given that people are moving around more.
She expects case numbers to keep rising but said areas outside Auckland could take action to stamp out local outbreaks.
Today’s statistics included one new death at North Shore Hospital — a woman in her 90s.
The new cases reported today include 192 cases in Auckland, seven in Waikato, two in Northland, three in Taupo, one in Rotorua and two in the Tararua district.
A further Rotorua case will be included in tomorrow’s official numbers.
Keeping track needed “We really need people to be getting tested if they have any symptoms, and also keeping track of their movements, and letting contact tracers know where they’ve been,” Dr Wiles said.
“So if everybody can do that, then we should be able to stamp out those cases again.”
Dr Wiles said if people did not take measures such as self-isolating there would be bigger outbreaks in areas beyond Auckland.
A total of 90 percent of New Zealanders have now had their first dose of the Pfizer covid-19 vaccine and 81 percent are fully vaccinated.
The latest figures show almost 27,000 first and second vaccine doses were given nationally yesterday.
Professor Michael Baker from the University of Otago said there were only five days left for people to get their first dose of covid-19 vaccine if they wanted to be fully protected before Christmas.
He said the clock was ticking and it was time to start a conversation with vaccine-hesitant friends and family.
In the areas with active cases, 71 percent of eligible Northlanders have had their second dose, 85 percent in Auckland, 78 percent in Waikato, 75 percent in Taranaki, 81 percent in Canterbury, 73 percent in Lakes DHB and 78 percent in MidCentral.
Ninety people in hospital
Ninety people are in hospital — most in Auckland but there is also one case each in Whangārei and Dargaville.
Of the hospital cases, 59 percent are unvaccinated or not eligible for a vaccine.
Dr Baker said he recommends only having vaccinated people at Christmas gatherings.
“If you have an unvaccinated person there, and the virus will be manifesting quite widely over that period, they are real risks to everyone at those events, and particularly to unvaccinated children and older people who may not have mounted such a good immune response to the vaccine,” he said.
Dr Baker said the government should keep a solid boundary around Auckland and keep the rest of the country in an elimination mode.
He also said the rollout of vaccines for children from ages 5 to 11 should start before Christmas.
“I think that would be a great Christmas gift to the children of New Zealand.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Auckland mayor Phil Goff has hit out at anti-lockdown protesters who held up traffic on roads throughout the country today, describing their actions as “crass and stupid”.
Police are promising to follow up on any offences or breaches of the laws after the Freedoms and Rights Coalition protest group took to the roads, trying to create a gridlock in New Zealand’s largest city by driving slowly.
On Facebook today, Goff said he came across them as he was returning from a Pasifika vaccination event at Mt Smart Stadium where he saw “volunteers and medical staff working in the pouring rain to ensure people are protected”.
He said their vehicles spread across three lanes of the motorway, doing 50 km an hour and deliberately blocking people from going about their business.
Goff said they were spreading disinformation and lies about covid-19 and vaccinations.
“Crass and stupid but what else would you expect?” he asked.
Cases and vaccination rates
The Ministry of Health reported 175 new community cases of covid-19 – 26 fewer than yesterday’s total.
Of those 159 are in Auckland, two in Northland, eight in Waikato, one in Taupō and the five previously announced cases in Taranaki.
The two new Northland cases have clear links to known cases.
However, the ministry late today confirmed three more positive results for Taupō in addition to the case announced earlier.
Two are household contacts.
The third is a close contact. This person, who is now isolating in Taupō, travelled to Masterton last weekend, before becoming ill on Monday.
Two other household contacts of the case have tested negative.
Ninety three people are in hospital – all in Auckland and eight more than yesterday.
Nine patients are in intensive care or a high dependency unit.
The latest wastewater result for the Taranaki town of Stratford has not detected covid-19.
Close to 90 percent target
Just over 2000 first doses of the covid-19 vaccine are needed for the whole country to officially reach the 90 percent milestone.
The latest figures from the Ministry of Health show Auckland DHB is the first to surpass more than 95 percent of the eligible population to have their first dose.
Nationally, about 80 percent have had a second dose.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
A New Zealand medical and logistics support team with essential supplies to assist Papua New Guinea with its covid-19 crisis has departed New Zealand.
Associate Foreign Minister Aupito William Sio said the PNG government had formally requested humanitarian and medical support from partner governments to respond to the health crisis, with rising case numbers, hospitalisations and deaths due to the current delta surge.
As of November 9, PNG has recorded 415 covid-19 deaths with local media reporting the health system is unable to cope with the medical crisis.
Aupito said New Zealand was deeply saddened by the increasing loss of lives in Papua New Guinea due to the pandemic.
“New Zealand remains committed to supporting its Pacific neighbours to respond to the challenges posed by the covid-19 pandemic,” the minister said.
“By working closely with our partners in the region, we can make a tangible contribution to covid-19 resilience,” Aupito said.
A logistics component comprising two NZ Defence Force logisticians and a NZ Defence Force Environmental Health Officer will support the PNG National Control Centre in the capital, Port Moresby.
A clinical component comprising two doctors and three nurses from private company Respond Global, two Fire and Emergency NZ logisticians and a representative from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade will be based in Bougainville to support the Bougainville Department of Health.
“Most of the team departed Saturday morning on a New Zealand Defence Force aircraft and will be based in Papua New Guinea for approximately one month,” Aupito William Sio said.
There are already medical teams on the ground from Australia and Britain assisting Papua New Guinea with the medical crisis.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Auckland is a thousand nurses short and lacks the capacity to deal with the amount of people self-isolating at home, according to New Zealand’s largest nurses’ union.
There are currently 85 covid-19 patients in hospital, including 11 in intensive care, and numbers are expected to climb.
The Nurses’ Organisation spokesperson Christina Couling said patients were at risk because there were not enough nurses even at this stage of the outbreak, and the system was under enormous strain.
She said it simply did not have the capacity to deal with the number of people who were self-isolating at home, with several hundred referrals to district health boards (DHBs) each day.
Another 201 covid-19 community cases were reported by the Ministry of Health today, including 15 in Waikato, one in Taranaki, four in Northland and the rest in Auckland.
The ministry said 109 of today’s cases were still to be linked. There have now been 755 unlinked cases in the past 14 days.
“We are very aware of the grief and hurt whānau who have recently lost loved ones to covid-19 are experiencing. This is a serious virus and none of us can afford to underestimate it,” Director of Public Health Caroline McElnay said at today’s media conference.
She urged people whose relatives were being cared for in the community and felt their condition was deteriorating to contact someone as soon as possible.
“Hospital care is free, and ambulance services are free for those with covid-19.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Bougainville President Ishmael Toroama has urged his people not to take a surge in covid-19 positive cases lightly, reports the PNG Post-Courier.
He said the pandemic had reached a large proportion globally — and even locally in Papua New Guinea where the seriousness of the crisis was shown by an alarming number of deaths and reported positive cases.
Toroama said the measures being instituted by the government were not to subdue individual rights to freedom of movement and the freedom to health care, they were a protective measure to protect lives.
“Under the new normal initiative, we must contain covid-19 and mitigate its spread throughout the region. We must work together to manage it,” he said.
Toroama also said vaccination was voluntary and no one would be forced to take it.
“However, those who opt not to receive the vaccine must not impede the rights of those who are willing to take it — everyone is entitled to healthcare in the region,” he said.
“No one must impose on the rights of the ones who want access to it.
Covid protocols apply
“For the Autonomous Bougainville Government, we do not have a ‘No Jab, No Job’ policy but covid-19 protocols still apply in the workplace environment.
“The 14-day lockdown imposed by the covid-19 response team is a direct response to the recent surge of covid-19 cases that we have in the region.”
He said the steps taken by the Pandemic Controller and Secretary of Health Clement Totavun were necessary to “keep our people safe”.
“I urge all to support the Covid-19 Response Team’s efforts to curb the spread of the virus and adhere to the measures imposed.”
He said the simple action of adhering to these measures would help protect the lives of “countless Bougainvilleans”.
According to the John Hopkins University covid dashboard, Papua New Guinea has 32,279 cases of infection and 415 deaths from covid-19. Health officials believe this is an under-estimate and less than 2 percent of the population are vaccinated.
Te Rūnanganui o Ngāti Hikairo located between Kāwhia and Te Awamutu were especially concerned with the number of young tamariki involved in the rallies.
They said Tāmaki, who was one of their own, was asking Māori communities to undermine science, putting their people at risk.
They have now called on the Destiny Church leader to take a whānau-first approach.
Rūnanga chair Susan Turner said because Tamaki was a descendant of their rūnanga it was important to show leadership and encourage the right messaging and approach to combatting covid 19.
She said Tamaki needed to promote scientific advice among whānau, iwi and the wider community to protect each other against the virus.
‘Share the right messages’
“Brian as a member of Ngāti Hikairo, we wanted to encourage him to share the right messages and dispel the rhetoric that he and his followers are saying to our people.
“We want them to follow science and go with the right advice and for our people to be united in this fight against covid,” she said.
The inclusion of mixed messaging related to freedom and self-determination was particularly concerning.
It comes as the rūnanga battles to prevent an outbreak amongst Ngāti Hikairoa whānau.
Turner said it did not reflect a mātauranga Māori approach as tino rangatiratanga should be represented by a collective effort to protect whānau and those most vulnerable.
The current approach from Tamaki was promoting a colonial approach to preserving life and liberty, she said.
“The biggest concern that we’ve got is the fact that they’re giving our people the wrong information.
Tamaki message ‘opposing tikanga’
“Those sentiments simply oppose the whole concept of what we believe is our tikanga which is about protecting ourselves, protecting our whānau and the people that live in our community.
“It’s clear to us that this virus is going to spread, and we need to do all we can to protect our whānau, our rangatahi and our tamariki,” she said.
The rūnanga strongly supported vaccines and said Tamaki carried a Ngāti Hikairo name, and with that came obligations to use his platform to strengthen Māori communities by encouraging whānau to get vaccinated and comply with health restrictions.
A spokesperson for Tamaki rejected RNZ’s request for an interview but said they wished to speak to Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Hikairo face-to-face about the issues at hand.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Some Aucklanders enjoying new freedoms today said there had been stress and anxiety in the community during New Zealand’s longest lockdown.
The country’s largest city moved to level 3 step 2 and shops can open — but swimming pools, cinemas and theatres remain closed.
Coincidentally, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern visited Auckland for the first time in 12 weeks touring a factory and visiting a Pacific vaccination drive.
She faced criticism for not meeting with other businesses such as hospitality or hairdressers.
Ardern said she would be returning to Auckland to see how the people were dealing with the delta outbreak.
This morning she spoke with Employers and Manufacturers Association chief executive Brett O’Riley and toured an engineering factory, before visiting a Pacific youth vaccination event in Māngere. It is her first trip to the city since lockdown was imposed in August.
In the stand-up, Ardern said the reason she was delayed in visiting Auckland was limitations in Parliament.
“As soon as those measures lifted, I found the first available time to come home,” she said.
“Tāmaki Makaurau is my home and today’s been really important for me to reconnect with those I’ve been keeping in contact with at a distance — business representatives, health providers — but also to have a chance to talk to Aucklanders about their experience.”
Schools to reopen Covid-19 Response and Education Minister Chris Hipkins said the benefits of reopening primary schools and kura in Auckland and Waikato on November 17 far outweighed any risks.
Children in Year 4 and up will need to wear a mask, the number on-site will be limited, and groups of children will have to distance themselves from one another.
Schools and kura will decide what works best for them, but most pupils in Years 1 to 8 will probably return part-time, while Years 9 and 10 go back full-time.
The opposition National Party wants all schools to reopen immediately, and said paying schools up to $400 per student and regularly testing children would help them make up for lost class time.
The party this morning released its “Back on Track” plan to help school students catch up on their curriculum.
The suburbs of interest in Auckland are Ranui, Sunnyvale, Kelston, Birkdale, Manurewa and Māngere.
81 people with Covid-19 in hospital, including 11 in ICU or HDU. Of those, 40 cases are either unvaccinated or not eligible, 25 are partially vaccinated, 10 are fully vaccinated, and the vaccination status of six is unknown.
4813 community cases in the current outbreak.
New Zealand’s vaccination percentages as at 10 November 2021. Graphic: Ministry of Health/RNZ
A man in his 60s who had covid-19 and was isolating at a home in Glen Eden in Auckland has died — the third such death.
The cause of his death will be determined by the coroner, including whether it may have been covid-related.
Two people isolating at home with covid-19 died last week.
Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said allowing covid-19 patients to isolate at home was generally working well but the deaths were being reviewed.
AstraZeneca vaccine becomes an option The AstraZeneca vaccine will be made available later this month for a small number of people aged 18 and over who cannot have the Pfizer shots for medical reasons.
Dr Bloomfield said people who were required to be vaccinated under the public health order, but who preferred AstraZeneca to Pfizer, could also opt for it.
He said only a few hundred people aged 18 and over would be eligible for the AstraZeneca vaccine from late November.
However, several hours later, Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins told Newstalk ZB AstraZeneca would actually be available to anyone who has a conversation with their doctor.
Vaccination status of total people in hospital in NZ’s delta outbreak as at 10 November 2021. Image: Ministry of Health/RNZ
Thousands of protesters turned up at New Zealand’s Parliament today, demanding an end to covid restrictions, while another group blocked Auckland’s northern boundary this morning.
Meanwhile, 125 new cases were reported and experts commented on the traffic light system. Here is a summary of today’s covid-19 developments.
There, they hurled abuse at media and police, threw tennis balls and water at them, while holding flags and signs with messages against lockdown, vaccination, the media and government.
Some tried to jump the railings, and security was ramped up.
House Speaker Trevor Mallard said security had never been so tight in his more-than-30 years at Parliament.
The protesters claimed an array of things like being segregated and the government having “trampled on the rights of New Zealanders”.
Some espoused misinformation, including about vaccines, while others said they wanted New Zealand to live with the virus and not be concerned about the risks.
Other people were upset about losing their jobs because they would not get vaccinated. Others just wanted to be back with family in Auckland.
Ardern has been under pressure to visit the city, but said she was limited by rules set by Speaker Mallard.
The rules were relaxed last week, with Ardern saying that “felt like then an opportunity where I was able to do both, get to Auckland, talk with business representatives, be able to see some of the work our frontline health workers are doing and still be able to be here [in Wellington].”
She is expected to meet with workers, business people and frontline health workers on her visit to Auckland tomorrow, but is not expected to be out and about in public.
In a statement, ACT leader David Seymour said Ardern should visit hairdressers and hospitality businesses “if she really wanted to understand Aucklanders’ situation”.
Experts weigh in on move to traffic light system Ardern said yesterday she expected Auckland would move to the Covid-19 Protection Framework — also known as the traffic light system — in just three weeks, once the city’s eligible population would be 90 percent fully vaccinated.
Retail stores can reopen in the city tomorrow and Plank said that could see case numbers rise as high as 500 per day around the beginning of December.
However, Australian epidemiologist Melbourne University professor Tony Blakely said the high number of people in the city with at least one jab should encourage health officials to ease restrictions and take advantage of the community’s “peak immunity”.
Dr Blakely’s views were based on the experiences New South Wales and Victoria had had while negotiating the lifting of restrictions there.
This has raised concerns about what emergency coverage will look like when their first vaccine deadline passes on Monday.
Volunteers make up four-fifths of Fire and Emergency’s (FENZ) 13,000 operational and community workers and some staff are concerned about the future of smaller rural stations if firefighters refuse to get vaccinated.
Other firefighters are frustrated that no proof of inoculation will be required as they are only being asked to make a declaration about their vaccination status.
FENZ said in a statement many staff must be vaccinated to undertake their roles as they work alongside medical practitioners and go into schools to provide education and respond to emergencies.
Police did not respond to questions about whether the mandate for firefighters would also apply to police, but said it was in discussions with the government about mandatory vaccination requirements.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
New Zealand’s Parliament was on high security today as thousands marched through the capital Wellington for an anti-lockdown and anti-vaccination protest.
Thousands of people gathered at Civic Square for an anti-lockdown and anti vaccination protest this morning.
The group intended to march to Parliament for what they are describing as a “freedom protest”.
Significant disruptions to the bus services in the capital were expected as buses detoured away from the central business distruct (CBD) to avoid the protest.
About 50 protesters arrived from the northern side of the boundary on State Highway 1 at Te Hana.
Traffic in both directions was brought to a halt by the group and some of their vehicles.
Police said they attempted to engage with the group and a number of vehicles were towed in order to clear the roadway.
Officers physically intervened to move protesters off the road and in the process one was bitten by an “as yet unidentified protester”, police said.
“Actions like this are totally avoidable and poses unnecessary risk to our staff who are simply trying do their part in preventing the spread of covid-19,” Waitematā District Commander Superintendent Naila Hassan said in a statement.
Protesters have dispersed and police will keep monitoring the site.
Protest ‘interferes with vaccination efforts’
Te Rūnanga ō Ngāti Whātua uri and chief operating officer Antony Thompson said trucks carrying food and medical supplies were being held up unnecessarily, “creating major risks to our communities and whānau of the North”.
He said thoughtless moves like this put whānau in danger and urged members of these groups to think about the impact they were having on those they believed they were trying to protect.
Thompson said protesters were using this as an opportunity to “grandstand their issue”.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced today that the New Zealand cabinet agreed to loosen restrictions for Auckland and upper Northland this week, while 190 new cases were reported and the deaths of two people who had covid-19 are under investigation.
Ardern said at the 4pm post-cabinet press conference that last week’s in principle decision to move Auckland to alert level 3, step 2, had been confirmed by cabinet.
Auckland will move to the new step from 11.59pm tomorrow, which means retail businesses and public facilities like libraries, museums and zoos can reopen.
Outdoor gathering limits increase to 25 people and the two-household restriction is removed.
“While we’re getting those rates higher still, we are easing into our reopening,” she said.
Ardern said that it’s hoped Auckland will reach 90 percent double-vaccination rates by the end of November, when the city will then change to the new traffic light framework.
81 covid people now in hospital
There is now an increase to 81 people in hospital with covid-19.
Two deaths were reported today of people who were positive for covid-19, but their causes of death will be determined by the coroner.
One person in their late 60s died in Auckland City Hospital on Saturday. The patient was admitted to hospital on October 23 for a trauma incident and tested positive for covid-19 on admission, the Ministry of Health said.
Another death was reported in a managed isolation facility this morning. In a statement the ministry said the returnee arrived on November 3 and tested positive during a routine day three test.
The cause of that person’s death will be determined by the coroner, including whether it may have been covid-19 related.
All three of Auckland’s district health boards (DHBs) had hit the 90 percent milestone for first doses of vaccinations late yesterday.
89% of NZers had first dose
To date, 89 percent of New Zealanders have had their first dose and 78 percent are fully vaccinated.
There were 14,280 vaccine doses administered yesterday, including 3272 first doses and 11,008 second doses.
Medsafe has also approved a booster dose of Pfizer vaccines for people aged over 18, at least six months after the second dose. The next step is for the technical advisory group to inform ministers about this, Ardern said.
She said there was a “strong expectation” that Auckland would move to the new “traffic light” system after a November 29 cabinet meeting.
“Moving to the new framework at that time will mean certainty for Auckland. It will mean all businesses can be open and operate, it will mean we will manage covid safely, but differently,” she said.
Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson told RNZ Checkpoint the push will now be on to meet that second dose target.
“We know that people now understand the importance of getting the second dose, we’re going to be working doubly hard to make sure that everybody over the next three weeks … comes forward.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Only 1.7 percent of Papua New Guineans have been fully vaccinated against covid-19. This has been a cause of concern for the international community, who are watching the virus spread through an exposed population with high rates of co-morbidities and minimal access to healthcare.
The mood within the country, however, is very different. No doubt there is abundant fear, but this has centred on the vaccine itself.
Many Papua New Guineans have access to the vaccine, even in some of the remotest corners of the country. They are also fully familiar with injected medicines and vaccinations against diseases like polio and measles.
But millions of Papua New Guineans are not getting vaccinated against covid because they are terrified of this specific vaccine. This is not “vaccine hesitancy”, but full-blown opposition, a genuine antipathy.
So, why is there such a fierce resistance to the covid vaccine? The key difference, as any good anthropologist will tell you, is cultural context.
Spiritual sickness Any attempt to understand local views on the covid vaccine must first appreciate that, within Melanesian societies, physicality is intimately connected to morality and spirituality. Because of this, biomedical explanations for disease are usually secondary to other causes or irrelevant.
My uncle died in my arms today. Please get your family vaccinated against COVID. Don’t listen to the anti vexers, everytime you do you are putting your loved ones and family at risk. #png#COVID#COVID19https://t.co/iFxqAa0u4c
This is mainly due to the small, sometimes non-existent role played by government education in the lives of most Papua New Guineans, especially the roughly 80 percent that live in rural villages.
For example, should an otherwise healthy person suddenly become ill and die, sorcery or witchcraft may be deemed the cause. Accusations are linked to interpersonal conflicts and jealousies that may have precipitated the mystical assault.
Such interpretations usually occur with individual misfortunes — not much larger events like a global pandemic. This is where Christianity becomes hugely important, making sense of broader problems like this.
The role of Christianity Nearly all Papua New Guineans (99.2%) are Christian. And the religious landscape in the country is powerfully influenced by Pentecostal and evangelical churches.
In PNG, Christianity provides not only the promise of eternal salvation, but biblically inscribed frameworks and prophetic ideas that inform how people live and view the world around them.
Many Christians, especially those believing in the Pentecostal and evangelical traditions, have a strong interest in the end of the world, as this signals the return of Jesus Christ.
Crucially, the imminent return of Christ is heralded by the world’s rapid moral decline and humanity being branded with the mark of the beast — a process mandated by Satan. As such, many Papua New Guinea Christians continuously and fearfully scan the horizon for this definitive sign.
Years ago, some Papua New Guinean friends declared barcodes were the mark. More recently, they insisted it was the government’s national ID card initiative.
Now, in a completely different order of magnitude and intensity, it is the covid vaccine.
As one group protesting a vaccine drive recently chanted, “Karim 666 chip goh!”, or “Get out of here with Satan’s microchip”.
From this perspective, the vaccine is a vehicle for much larger forces of global and cosmic tyranny. The speed with which the vaccine was developed, its global reach, and the apparent coercion of vaccine mandates all further strengthen suspicions of its evil origins.
However, Christianity is not the sole factor spurring anti-vaccination sentiment. Indeed, powerful misinformation on social media has also been influential, such as rumours the vaccine carries a microchip or commonly causes death. People also have a well-founded distrust of outsiders, and they view both the virus and vaccine as foreign assaults on PNG’s sovereignty.
In the absence of Western biomedical knowledge or a lack of faith in its validity, these theories flourish. Those with more sustained exposure to Western culture often try in vain to convince their compatriots against this kind of thinking.
A member of the public voicing concerns about covid vaccines during the launch of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in Madang. Image: PNG National Department of Health/Facebook
Alternative treatments
While defiantly resisting vaccination, many Papua New Guineans nonetheless acknowledge covid-19 is real and that it causes sickness.
With infection rates, hospital admissions, and deaths now surging, it would be hard to ignore this reality. The rising covid-19 mortality across the country has scared some into receiving the vaccine, but even those open to vaccination are easily spooked by rumours of subsequent death.
In the absence of vaccinations, Papua New Guineans have turned to three main methods of treatment: prayer and healing, organic remedies, and reliance on a claimed strong natural immunity to disease.
As Christians strongly influenced by the evangelical and Pentecostal traditions, many people pray to God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit to not just mitigate, but annihilate, the evil sickness.
In addition, many are turning to organic traditional remedies to ward off illness. This mainly consists of spices and leaves used in drinks and steaming.
Finally, there is a strongly held belief that Papua New Guineans possess an intrinsically strong immune system, buttressed by a diet of garden food, which makes them more resistant to the incursion of the covid virus.
What can the authorities do? For most Westerners, vaccines are an obvious and intrinsic good. For many Papua New Guineans, vaccines are a dangerous, unknown, and sinister threat. This is due to a combination of forces – governmental neglect, strong religiosity, and a justified distrust of outsiders.
This local position needs to be very sensitively understood and respected, not dismissed or criticised.
Vaccine campaign message featuring Cardinal John Ribat of Papua New Guinea. Image: PNG National Department of Health/Facebook
At the same time, deaths must be prevented and the thick fog of opposition surrounding the vaccine must be dissipated. But how?
Detailed information about the vaccine, including its creation, contents, efficacy, and potential side effects, must be made fully known to people before asking them to be vaccinated. Insisting a population with minimal information be vaccinated is not ethical or fair.
Likely in response to the widespread apocalyptic interpretations of the vaccine, the PNG Council of Churches is now actively promoting its safety and benefits. The government also needs to step up its efforts and commit to a nationwide educational campaign if hopes for substantial vaccine uptake are ever to be realised.
The success of the whole endeavour — and steering Papua New Guinea away from a public health catastrophe — will likely turn on persuading ordinary people the vaccine is a divine blessing and not a Satanic curse.
An Auckland councillor says he is astounded by the lack of cultural awareness shown by the authorities towards Māori and Pacific communities this far into the pandemic.
Manukau ward councillor Fa’anana Efeso Collins said covid-19 has become a Māori and Pacific outbreak, and South Auckland in particular is bearing the brunt.
He said calls over the past year for Māori and Pacific representatives to be at the decision-making table had been largely ignored.
Collins said those designing the response seem to have little knowledge of the communities, and it was showing.
Fa’anana Efeso Collins … “decisions are so far detached and disconnected from the realities on the ground.” Image: RNZ
“[We should have] people who are on the ground who understand our communities — right from the very beginning our request was that they be around the table that makes the decisions.
“And so these decisions are so far detached and disconnected from the realities on the ground.”
A breakdown of covid ethnicity statistics in NZ. Source: Ministry of Health
Fa’anana said the fact the government’s process for dealing with people in self-isolation was not practical was a glaring example.
On Friday a man in his fifties died in a Mount Eden apartment block after discharging himself from hospital on Wednesday.
And a 40-year-old man died while self-isolating in Manukau on Wednesday.
The cause of death has not been determined in either case, but the Health Ministry said the deaths were being considered as part of a wider systemic review it was carrying out with Auckland district health boards (DHBs).
“You know, the Ministry of Health says everyone gets sent an email. I think it’s time to get real — none of us read emails.
“And so I think that’s the level of lack of intelligence that perhaps we’re seeing from the Ministry of Health because they’re not on the ground, they don’t understand our communities.”
Battling the Health Ministry
“Fa’anana said health reforms cannot come soon enough.
Fa’anana’s criticisms come as Whānau Ora is battling the Health Ministry in court to try get access to personal data on unvaccinated Māori released to them.
The organisation wants to use the data for directing campaigns to increase vaccination rates among Māori.
The ministry has agreed to provide some of the data sought. It agreed to supply individual’s vaccination status for previous clients of Whānau Ora services, and anonymous vaccination status data to street level, to show unvaccinated areas in communities.
While the ministry has so far refused to hand over the full personalised data, after a High Court ruling this week it agreed to work with Whānau Ora to identify places where “outreach to Māori is most needed”, and to identify what data sharing was needed in those cases.
South Auckland health workers going door-to-door Manurewa-Papakura ward councillor Daniel Newman said the ministry’s vaccination campaign had fallen short and left too many people vulnerable to the virus.
He said the government’s failure to set vaccine targets for Māori was already having consequences, and that is showing in hospitalisation statistics.
In his ward, frontline healthcare workers have resorted to door-to-door visits in an effort to reach vulnerable and vaccine-hesitant residents.
However, that could potentially expose them to people who are infectious with the virus and are isolating at home, he said.
He called on the government to protect healthworkers by letting them know where people are isolating at home with covid-19.
“It’s really important that we stay safe, because not only do we need to protect our own health, but we can’t become conduits for covid-19 ourself.
“The important thing for us is that we have enough scale that we have the ability to get to enough people as soon as possible.”
He said the door-to-door approach was necessary: “We’re in a race against covid-19 which is seeding in those streets, we need to get people protected before they become unwell.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
(@alexwapa) 
