antiviral medication<\/a> had also been purchased and would be freely available to older New Zealanders.<\/p>\n“Anyone over the age of 65, and M\u0101ori and Pacific people over the age of 50, or anyone who meets Pharmac requirements, can access the treatment in the early stages of contracting the virus,” she said.<\/p>\n
“This means more than double the number of New Zealanders will be able to access these medicines if they need them than previously.<\/p>\n
She acknowledged that lessening the restrictions caused concern to disabled and immune-compromised people.<\/p>\n
“I want to reassure those Kiwis that we are making these changes because risks are lower, in fact cases are more than 10 times lower than what they were earlier in the year and we now have layers of protections in place.”<\/p>\n
She said the support was not ending and hoped that removing the remaining vaccine mandates would ease the staffing pressures disability services have been under.<\/p>\n
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"RNZ News All mask wearing requirements in Aotearoa New Zealand \u2014 except in healthcare and aged care \u2014 will be scrapped, and household contacts will no longer need to isolate, the government confirmed today. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Minister for Covid-19 Response Dr Ayesha Verrall confirmed cabinet\u2019s decision to scrap the Covid-19 Protection Framework<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":400,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52491,51171,338,33374,304,35046,5,365,387,8342,31913,11426,345,255,12,403,14,1573,1716,52493,368,417,751,1,33089],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796240"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/400"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=796240"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796240\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":796472,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796240\/revisions\/796472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=796240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=796240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=796240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}