The slow but steady COVID-19 vaccine rollout could help New Zealand in the long run epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker says.
With countries like the UK, Israel and the US all starting their vaccination programs at the end of 2020, New Zealand now has the option of looking at the data provided by those countries when deciding the next step in our vaccination program.
So far 3.5 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered to Kiwis - 2.29m are first doses while 1.21m are second doses.
Baker told RNZ by New Zealand starting its program later than other countries, it can look at the data while also getting the most advanced vaccines from companies like Pfizer.
"The great thing New Zealand has is we can learn from the experience from countries overseas, particularly Israel and the UK which have high vaccine coverage that vaccinated early and also have very good data on the performance of the vaccines," Baker said on Sunday.
"We will also have the benefit that Pfizer and other companies are looking at reformulating the vaccine to take into account delta and other variants and we could really benefit from our current timing from those advances."
This advice comes after research has shown that protection from the virus with both doses of the COVID-19 vaccine starts to wane. The Pfizer vaccine's effectiveness drops from 92 percent to 78 percent in just three months, according to an Oxford University study in the UK.
The US Centre for Disease Control found a bigger decline from 91 percent to 66 percent when the Pfizer vaccine is faced with Delta. Other estimates out of Israel are even lower and it's getting worse with time.
"It's these two issues we are familiar with, waning immunity and virus evolution," Baker told RNZ. "We may be in the situation that many people predicted that we may need to be re-vaccinated every year as we do with influenza.
"Of course the priority for New Zealand is to vaccinate the unvaccinated but the next group that might be considered for boosting might be people who have not generated a great immune response the first time around, which could be people who are immunocompromised and frail elderly.
"Then I think we would be looking at our border workers who were the first to get vaccinated in New Zealand."
The vaccination numbers might have started slow in New Zealand but numbers have increased quickly over the last month. Our World in Data released a graph showing New Zealand managed to overtake the US, UK and Australia in daily vaccination rates.
Canada, the US and UK's daily vaccine rates take off in December 2020 while Australia and New Zealand are quite far behind, only joining the graph in February 2021.
In April, the US' daily vaccination rate peaks at just over 1 vaccine per 100 people, while the UK peaks in May and Canada in late June.
But while other countries' daily vaccination rates slowed, Australia and New Zealand's daily vaccination rates shot up significantly, and in August Aotearoa far surpassed other countries' peaks to take the highest vaccine rate of 1.65.
