Saturday Morning With Jack Tame

Winston Peters has ended his long-running media hiatus by appearing on Australian morning TV and giving the vaccine rollout in New Zealand a bit of a kicking. It’s been too slow, he says.Easy to criticise when you’re out of government of course, but is that fair? I think it’s worth considering a really basic question: What was the primary aim for New Zealand’s vaccine rollout?Was the aim to safely vaccinate New Zealanders as quickly as possible? As a developed country heavily reliant on open borders, it was in the best interests of our collective health and economy to get us all vaccinated as soon as possible. The virus is mutating fast. It’s becoming more infectious. As lucky as we are to be living life free of community transmission, you need only look at Melbourne or Sydney or Taiwan, to know how quickly that can change. With those kinds of risks, there’s a good argument to be made that New Zealand should have done whatever it took to get as high up the vaccine list as possible, even without community tran