Genter Julie AnneHon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): Tēnā koe Madam Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. The Green Party will be supporting this bill. Many of the earlier speakers have outlined the reasons why it needs to happen under urgency. I just want to really briefly go through the background to all of this. Obviously COVID-19 has been devastating for the countries that have had uncontrolled outbreaks including the country of my birth. Huge numbers of people have died prematurely due to COVID-19. Many many others some who didn't even experience the illness in a serious way have had ongoing health impacts from the disease and it's unclear what the lifetime impacts will be from that. So the rapid development of an effective vaccine against COVID-19 has been fantastic and is something the Green Party welcomes and it is going to save lives.The mRNA vaccine of which Pfizer is one has been shown to even reduce ongoing symptoms of people who have already had the illness and the severity of those symptoms. So not only is it preventative but it can actually help people who have had those ongoing health impacts and so the Green Party is very very supportive of the Government's plan to roll out the Pfizer vaccine to all New Zealanders. This is something that means that people won't have to live in fear of getting COVID-19 and having those really debilitating ongoing impacts or potentially dying prematurely.Of course one of the really terrifying things about COVID-19—and I know someone who was in this situation in the United States where they initially caught the illness early on in the pandemic and were relatively fine and over a year went by and they caught it a second time and they actually were severely ill and two of them died the second time they got it. So this is a really bad illness and I am aware that there are people who are out there fear-mongering about this vaccine. I can tell those people or anyone who might hear from them that those people have no idea what they're talking about.Any potential negative side-effects that have been observed with the vaccine are minuscule and tiny compared to the illness itself and so we are far better off getting this vaccine and we're quite lucky to be in this situation to be in a country that has been safe from COVID-19 for most of the past year. We're in a situation where we are able to afford and to get the vaccine. There are some countries in the world that desperately need this vaccine and they're not getting it. There's not a plan to roll it out to all of their citizens which I think is a problem and something that we as a global community need to work on because we're all better off if this illness is not running rampant around the world. So there has been much discussion about the technical reasons. What this comes down to the reason for the legislative change today is ultimately that the Medicines Act 1981 is out of date has been unable to keep up with rapid advances in technology and medicines and it's actually something that when I was health spokesperson for the Green Party was constantly raised with me by people who had different forms of cancer. They weren't able to access some of the most cutting-edge treatments because our process for approving medicines is actually very very slow and doesn't allow for that widespread rapid uptake of something. So it is important. This is a quick fix to that. It's not the long-term fix which is to move to the Therapeutic Products Bill which I know has been a complicated piece of work that has taken a long time especially given that we had to face the pandemic.But just to read from the judgment to reassure anyone who might be concerned about why the Government is changing the law it is because the provisional consent was only—in the law it said it could be approved for use for only a limited number of people and obviously we're not doing this for a limited number of people; it needs to be for everyone. But it must be recognised"—and I quote here—"that the process gone through here was not an orthodox provisional consent process—it went above and beyond … it is difficult to see how the assessment process could in the circumstances have been more thorough."So there isn't risk that people need to be worried about. This was a thorough approval process. Both my parents and most of my friends in the United States have already been vaccinated most of them with the Pfizer vaccine and they're all doing really really well and are hugely relieved to have received the vaccine. We're looking forward to the roll-out widespread of the vaccine here in Aotearoa New Zealand."