Verrall AyeshaHon Dr AYESHA VERRALL (Associate Minister of Health): This Government can give New Zealanders confidence that we will remain safe from COVID-19. It's confidence built under our elimination strategy drawing on our decisive early action and our continuing efforts to keep it out and to stamp it out. That's why we have proven ourselves to be one of the safest countries of the world with respect to COVID and why we've been able to sustain high economic performance in the face of a global pandemic when many other countries have suffered.In the last week we've announced two important parts of our continuing plan to keep New Zealanders safe. We have secured access for all New Zealanders to the highly effective Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and today we have announced our plan for the vaccine roll-out. Today I want to talk about how these vaccines keep us safe how we have sequenced our vaccination roll-out plan and what we can anticipate in the future. The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine has consistently shown strong results in clinical trials. We knew from the first clinical trial that it offered really strong protection against hospitalisation. This is really important. Look around the countries with large outbreaks and you see hospitals getting overwhelmed. We know that by access to this vaccine we can prevent a crisis in our health system. But there are also other threads of evidence that are important to think about as well. We're seeing early signs in the evidence that the Pfizer vaccine protects against infection and therefore reduces a person's ability to transmit the virus. This is a hard-to-measure part of the vaccine but there are a variety of different pieces of evidence coming in. For example initial evidence from the UK found that there was an 86 percent reduction in infection for recipients of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. Similarly early published but not peer-reviewed results from Israel show an 89 percent reduction in infection. Both symptomatic and asymptomatic cases were measured. These sorts of results suggest that the vaccine recipients may not be able to transmit the virus and it gives us the sense that it may be possible to achieve herd immunity through use of the vaccines.Another point about the Pfizer vaccine is that we had a number of good vaccines to choose from but I'm particularly pleased we chose the Pfizer vaccine. It has shown consistent high efficacy. The other vaccines that we had choices from are also good but some have had to address questions about their efficacy in the elderly. I can reassure seniors in New Zealand that this has performed consistently well. For example Public Health England reported that for people over the age of 80 there is an 89 percent vaccine efficacy for the Pfizer vaccine.Today we announced our sequencing plan. It is a balanced plan. It uses the vaccine strategically to block the virus's entry into the country by vaccinating first border workers and their families then healthcare workers. Next we move on to those at high risk of catching COVID because they work or live in high-risk settings like aged residential care or other congregate settings. I also want to talk about the practicalities of our roll-out of this the largest vaccination programme in history. We know when we embark on this roll-out that there are groups that our health system has traditionally under-served. It would be a tragedy if we got to the end of our programme and we hadn't addressed their needs. I want to acknowledge the work of my colleagues Minister Henare and Minister Sio in making sure we think carefully about how we reach them. I note that we're rolling out the vaccine using Māori and Pacific providers early on in the sequencing framework to make sure that we are addressing the needs of older people from Māori and Pacific communities who are less likely to be in aged residential care. We'll be using a variety of settings: GPs workplaces community testing centres and will complement this with top-shelf information technology for the vaccine register and stock management.There are threats when it comes to this virus but we now have a picture of a hopeful way out of it. Yes there are uncertainties ahead. I think a lot about the risk of emerging variants but I like the Prime Minister share the hope that we will get to a situation where managing this virus will be like the flu. In doing so we'll also lead our community's collective efforts to fight COVID and I ask my fellow New Zealanders to recommit to our fight to unite against COVID by getting a vaccine.