Vaccination centres could be operational within the next 48 hours, says Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern - despite health officials imposing a temporary two-day suspension on vaccinations as New Zealand entered a snap three-day lockdown.
As the country shifted to alert level 4 at 11:59pm on Tuesday, vaccinations were temporarily put on hold to allow clinics the time to readjust their modes of operation to be consistent with lockdown protocol.
The Prime Minister, who spoke to The AM Show from the Beehive on Wednesday morning, was pressed by host Ryan Bridge as to why plans had not already been in place to quickly move vaccination clinics to alert level 4 protocol in the event of an outbreak.
"Given the best thing we can do is be fully vaccinated, why are we shutting down our centres? Why were we not prepared to have centres open during a Delta outbreak?" Bridge asked.
The Prime Minister explained the brief suspension will allow clinics to "reorientate" - however, she anticipates vaccination centres will be back up and running before the 48-hour threshold.
"The advice I've had from [the Ministry of] Health is they don't believe it will take that period of time," she told The AM Show.
The decision to temporarily suspend the vaccination rollout - which has already proved contentious for its sluggish pace - was made to allow clinics the time to introduce safety protocols consistent with alert level 4, such as social distancing.
"We've given an indication of a period of time in order for those vaccination centres to to orientate towards making sure they can maintain all the protocols you'd expect in a level 4 environment," Ardern continued.
"I don't know if you've visited a vaccination centre, but they're very high through-put, some of them are seeing 1000 a day - so it means they haven't been operating with things like social distancing and all the things to make sure in a level 4 environment, they can safely operate. They've asked for just a bit of time to reorientate and then they'll want to reopen."
Ardern noted that health officials are looking into the possibility of introducing drive-through vaccination, similar to the drive-through swabbing conducted at testing clinics throughout previous lockdowns.
"I believe it will be less than 48 hours, we're looking to give an update at 1pm today," she reiterated. "But I anticipate it will not take 48 hours to reopen.
"My goal is we will continue [to vaccinate] with this very short interlude to ensure people's safety."
But the suspension has not gone down well with the Opposition, with the National Party leader Judith Collins calling the decision to halt the rollout "unusual".
"It seemed unusual to me. I did raise the issue about why we were doing that. [Ardern] said… They wanted to make sure it could be done safely. I've been in the public vaccination centres, in the great big barns and things, looks to me like everyone's being extremely safe around their social distancing, mask-wearing, everything else. The best thing we can see is getting vaccinated," Collins told The AM Show.
"Mostly our country is largely unvaccinated and the best thing we can do is get as many people vaccinated as soon as we can. Look, we're not going to play silly games with this. Just as fast as we can, get people vaccinated."
ACT leader David Seymour has also berated the Government's decision to pause its vaccination efforts, branding it "nonsensical".
"We need to get the population vaccinated as fast as possible. Stopping vaccinations makes no sense. We should have been prepared for this," he said in a statement on Tuesday evening.
Around 40 percent of the eligible population in Aotearoa has received at least one dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, but the original case identified on Tuesday - a 58-year-old man living in Devonport on Auckland's North Shore - was not vaccinated, as he experienced issues with the booking site.
On Wednesday morning, it was confirmed that four additional people had tested positive for COVID-19 - all of whom are linked to the original case.
Public health staff are now undertaking interviews with the new cases, Ardern said, and additional locations of interest will be made public once they have been identified.
It's likely Auckland City Hospital will impose some form of internal lockdown, the Prime Minister suggested, following the news that one of the new cases is a fully-vaccinated nurse at the facility.
As the source of the current cluster remains unknown, it is difficult for modellers to estimate how significant the outbreak could be.
"We often have modellers who make estimates but it is quite early - low numbers make modelling quite difficult," Ardern said, noting that information around the source of the transmission is crucial.
