New Zealand buys enough Covid vaccine for the whole country

Millions of doses secured for roll-out starting in spring next year

Jacinda Ardern and Covid-19 response minister Chris Hipkins visit a lab at Auckland University after announcing they have secured enough vaccine doses to immunise the whole population (Getty Images)

New Zealand has secured enough Covid vaccine doses to immunise its entire population by the middle of next year.  

The country’s prime minster Jacinda Ardern announced on Thursday every citizen would be offered a free jab, after signing agreements with two more pharmaceutical companies.  

AstraZeneca, the firm which has partnered with the University of Oxford to make a vaccine which is now being assessed by the UK’s regulator, has agreed to sell 7.6m doses, while Novavax, an American biotech company, has signed up to provide 10.7m doses.

These agreements are on top of previous deals to buy 1.5m doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine which is currently being rolled out in the UK, and 5m doses of another vaccine by the pharmaceutical company Janssen.

As both vaccines require two doses to be effective, New Zealand now has access to enough jabs to inoculate its entire 5.5m population several times over.  

“It will be New Zealand’s largest immunisation roll-out ever,” Ms Ardern said at a news conference on Thursday.  

All the vaccines secured by the government are still to complete their regulatory processes and some have not yet even finished their clinical trials.  

New Zealand is one of the few countries which has managed to effectively eliminate Covid and resume normal life.

There have only been 25 deaths and just 1,744 confirmed cases in the Pacific island nation, after a strict lockdown and the curtailment of international travel managed to eradicate the virus earlier this year.  

The priority groups to receive the first jabs will be border staff and health and emergency workers, Ms Arden explained.  

It is hoped to begin rolling out the vaccine to these first groups in the second quarter of 2021, but this could not be confirmed until nearer the time, she added, given the enormous demand worldwide for vaccine doses.  

“Never before has the entire globe sought to vaccinate the entire population at the same time,” Ardern said. “This will be a sustained roll out over months, not weeks, but our pre-purchase agreements means New Zealand is well positioned to get on with it as soon as it is proven safe to do so.”

New Zealand’s policy to keep its borders shut to prevent Covid gaining another foothold will not be relaxed even during the vaccine rollout, she also said. 

The country’s Covid-19 response minister, Chris Hipkins, said although New Zealand had never before attempted an immunisation programme on this scale plans were well underway to ensure it was successful.

"Workforce planning to ensure we have enough vaccinators is well advanced. There are around 12,000 health professionals already able to administer vaccines and more will be trained.”

Furthermore, the health ministry was creating a specialised inventory management system to track vaccines and check they were being kept at the correct temperatures, he said.  

Many of the Covid vaccines, including the Pfizer/BioNTech one being used in Britain, must be kept at ultra-low temperatures of -70 degrees Celsius and below.  

New Zealand’s good news on securing enough vaccine doses came as its economy continued a rebound following the lockdown-induced recession earlier this year.  

While GDP plummeted 12.2 per cent in the second quarter of 2020, it surged back by 12.9 per cent in the following quarter.  

“The government’s decision to act quickly in response to the global Covid-19 pandemic has contributed to a better than expected economic recovery,” the finance minister Grant Robertson said.  

“While New Zealand’s economy contracted in 2020, it is forecast to rebound strongly in 2021, outperforming regions we compare ourselves to like the euro zone, the United Kingdom and Japan.”