Bishop Chris; Hipkins ChrisCHRIS BISHOP (National): Thank you Mr Chair and thank you for that illuminating answer. I want to turn to the issue of vaccine supply and ask a couple of particular questions. The first is a prefatory remark we've been told for most of the year that it's very very difficult to get earlier delivery than what we have of the Pfizer vaccine. Every attempt that's been made by us and other commentators to encourage the Government to get speedier delivery we've been told that that's impossible that the Pfizer delivery time lines are what they are and there's nothing we can do about that. That's been contested but I don't want to ask about that because we've been back and forth about that in the House.The issue is: when did the Government go and seek the arrangement or the arrangements plural that the Prime Minister has signalled will be announced in the coming days? When was the period when the Government started to explore those options and first made contact with the Government or Governments plural or company or companies plural that have delivered what will be announced? So that's the first question. And then the second one is a slightly different one but relating to vaccine supply. I've been contacted by some people who just simply don't want the mRNA vaccines. They don't want Pfizer for whatever reason—I don't really understand why but they're just a bit nervous about it. They've got the heebie jeebies some would say and they're very keen on either the AstraZeneca vaccine or the Novavax vaccine. And they say they won't get Pfizer but they will get Novavax. That was obviously something that is on the table for New Zealand. Can the Minister outline to the House when that might be available as a supplementary vaccine for those who obviously don't want to get Pfizer?Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister for COVID-19 Response): Perhaps if I could put a few things on record at this point. The first is going back to late last year the Government entered into advance purchaser arrangements whilst the vaccines were still in development for four different vaccines. We purchased enough AstraZeneca vaccine which everyone will recall at the time was seen as the most promising vaccine the one that everyone was desperate to buy. We purchased enough for full population coverage of AstraZeneca enough for the full two doses to be given to every New Zealander. And we purchased enough for full population coverage using the Janssen vaccine produced by Johnson & Johnson a single shot vaccine. We procured 1.5 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine—which at that time had probably the biggest question marks over it—and we purchased 1.5 million doses which was enough to vaccinate 750000 New Zealanders. That quickly proved to be one of the most effective vaccines and early this year we made the decision that for New Zealand we wanted to maximise the effectiveness of the vaccines that we were rolling out that there were benefits to rolling out one vaccine to the whole of the population.Our conversations with Pfizer indicated that they could supply us this year enough vaccines to immunise the whole population with that. We agreed with them. We negotiated with them. They indicated that they could supply us the balance of our vaccines in the second half of the year spread through the second half of the year and that's when the discussions began. After representations directly from the Prime Minister to the chief executive they agreed that they could supply us all of our vaccines by October. The conversations have been ongoing ever since then to try and get vaccines into the country as quickly as possible. So it is wrong to say that we haven't been trying to get vaccines into the country as fast as we can right the way through but we have made the decision that we think the Pfizer vaccine is going to provide the best protection for New Zealand as a country. So that is where our focus has been in rolling that out and getting it into the country as quickly as we can.The final thing that I would note is that as we get into a different phase of vaccine supply globally there are new opportunities to secure doses of vaccine safely and securely to meet New Zealand's needs that don't necessarily mean that they have to come directly from Pfizer. We are exploring those avenues. Those opportunities were not available to us even a month ago but they are available to us now so we will absolutely make the most of those.I'd point out that we're not the only country in this situation. Australia since they encountered some resistance to the roll-out of the AstraZeneca vaccine have been working very hard to secure additional supplies of the Pfizer vaccine and they were no more successful than New Zealand has been up until this point. So things have changed a lot over the last month which have opened up new possibilities for New Zealand and Australia. We've taken a different approach to the Australians in the way we talk about that. We tend to talk about it right at the end once the deal's been done and the vaccines are on the way; they tend to talk about it while they're negotiating the deals. Those are decisions for our respective countries. But I can assure every member of the House that the goal of getting vaccines into the country as fast as possible has been driving Government activity since the beginning of the year.