The secret vaccination plan

Newsroom reports on something so farcical it should be made into a TV series:

Moreover, the Ministry said the final plan didn’t just take into account DHB expectations but also the nationwide, overarching “vaccination rollout plan“. That sounds great! Except the chart the Ministry linked to poses two problems.

First, it shows we are much farther behind than the chart Verrall pointed to. While Verrall’s chart (let’s call it Mythical Plan Chart A) said we were only expecting to vaccinate around 31,000 people last week, the “vaccination rollout plan” (hereafter known as Mythical Plan Chart B) has us vaccinating more than twice that many people every week by the start of April.

So Mythical Plan Chart A and Chart B contradict each other.

That leads into the second problem with Mythical Plan Chart B: It appears to be completely made up. When Bishop asked Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins for the data underlying the chart, so that the Opposition and media can better hold the Government’s rollout to account against its own aspirational targets, he said there were no numbers behind it. Instead, he said that Mythical Plan Chart B “is intended to be illustrative and approximate”.

So, our vaccination rollout is based on DHB expectations of how many people they’ll vaccinate, layered on top of a chart that appears to be little more than nice-looking lines drawn on a sheet of paper.

That is our vaccination plan – some nice-looking lines.

The Ministry of Health won’t give out daily vaccine data, ministers and officials can’t say what percentage of the frontline border workforce meant to be vaccinated by early March has actually been immunised and now an unvaccinated border worker has tested positive for Covid-19 and no one has any clue why.

Making it up on the fly has failed us – it’s time for the Government to give us a plan.

The Government seems weary of giving us any firm numbers, probably because they invariably fail to deliver on them.