COVID-19 vaccination bookings for the 55-59 age group will open on Friday, five days ahead of schedule.
More than 2 million doses have now been administered, COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said on Wednesday, tracking 3 percent ahead of the original plan - allowing the next age group down to get theirs sooner than expected.
So far bookings have mostly only been open to people in groups 1, 2 and 3, and over-60s in group 4. Over-55s will join them in the queue on Friday.
"We're able to bring this group forward because of the great response from the earlier groups, and because DHBs have been continuing to add capacity through their vaccination programmes to vaccinate more people and faster," said Hipkins.
"We're on track to ensure every eligible New Zealander has the opportunity to be vaccinated by the end of this year."
Some younger people in group 4 have been able to get their jabs earlier too, by accepting an invite to the mass vaccination events being held in Manukau. The first was held last weekend, and helped boost the vaccine rollout to its "best yet week" of 261,000 doses.
"I'm very pleased to announce that yesterday we delivered our 2 millionth dose of the CVID-19 PFizer vaccine, among the 42,200 doses that were delivered yesterday - the biggest date yet that we had on record."
Opening the bookings to the 55-plus group early won't stop over-60s getting theirs, Hipkins said, confident the growing capacity of the vaccination programme can handle it.
With workplaces soon likely to be offering vaccines to employees too, he said the next million should be delivered by the end of August - "much, much faster" than the first 2 million.
The Government has received 250 applications from workplaces to offer the jabs.
"These applications are currently being assessed by an evaluation panel. Mainfreight and Fonterra are the initial pilot work sites. They'll be followed by the Warehouse Group and Fisher & Paykel healthcare."
So far New Zealand has fully vaccinated 769,700 people, with another 950,000 booked in.
From Friday, anyone newly eligible should receive an invite to get vaccinated, or they can book online at bookmyvaccine.covid19.health.nz or by calling 0800 28 29 26.
Hipkins also talked about the need to keep the country's "staunch" border stance, citing the growing numbers of infections globally, driven by the highly contagious Delta variant.
"The WHO continues to warn that many people are mistakenly seeing the pandemic as coming to an end. It is not.
"That is why our managed isolation programme has to continue to be very careful in its balance of keeping COVID-19 - and particularly the Delta variant - out of New Zealand, whilst also allowing New Zealanders to return home and bringing in critical workers to support New Zealand's recovery."
