Our vaccine hesitancy problem New Zealand’s long-term strategy for managing the impact of Covid-19 is to achieve herd immunity via mass vaccination. But a significant number of people are likely to refuse the vaccine. Many of them will do so because of misplaced fears about the vaccine, stoked by misinformation. Across the country, the proportion of Māori children and babies vaccinated against a range of diseases is about 5 percentage points lower than for children and babies of European ethnicity. Among people aged over 65, there is a 9 percentage point gap in vaccination rates for the existing flu vaccine between non-Māori and Māori.