A senior Labour MP doesn't share his colleagues' fears the country could run out of COVID-19 vaccines before the big shipment from supplier Pfizer arrives in July.
Both the Prime Minister and COVID-19 Response Minister have previously said there was a chance our supplies could run out before the rollout to the wider population in July.
"Based on what we've got in the country and what we're expecting to get between now and the end of June, it's possible by late June we will have a supply problem," Chris Hipkins said on May 11.
"I should note, that even with planning in place, there is some risk that we'll have a period between shipments when we run low, or out of vaccine temporarily," Jacinda Ardern said that same week.
New Zealand's reliant on deliveries from Pfizer. Our original plan was to source vaccines from four different suppliers, but that was abandoned after seeing the success the Pfizer jab was having overseas, while the others struggled with reports of serious adverse side effects and delays.
But as other countries had already made big orders, our major shipment couldn't be locked in until mid-year. AM Show host Duncan Garner put it to Labour's David Parker we're on track to run out before then.
"No we're not. That's just not correct," he said. "I've been over this time and again... We said when we went for the Pfizer vaccine that the deliveries, the big delivery's in the latter half of the year, that until then we would be managing stocks."
Parker said despite the rollout to date at 108 percent of expectations, we won't run out.
"We're vaccinating about 60,000 or 70,000 people a week at the moment. We've done about 600,000 jabs. Our deliveries are around 50,000 a week at the moment, and we're vaccinating slightly more than that, which means our stock is decreasing until we get the big deliveries in July."
As of May 23, there were 327,240 doses in the national stockpile. It's dropped about 25,000 a week over the past month - at that rate there's about 13 weeks' supply left. The number of doses administered each week has been relatively static in the past month.
National MP Simon Bridges, appearing with Parker on The AM Show, said the Government keeps moving the goalposts.
"You guys have been consistent that any adult who wants to will be able to be vaccined, vaccinated, get the two jabs by the end of this year. Are we still on for that?" he asked.
"Yes," said Parker.
