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The judge said Oranga Tamariki was anxious to get the children jabbed after the 2019 measles outbreak. However, the mother opposed it, saying vaccines contained mercury, she was concerned about side effects and that not vaccinating them had not led to them catching the diseases. At the hearing in July, Oranga Tamariki brought in associate professor at the Auckland Medical School and immunisation expert Dr Helen Petousis-Harris who refuted the mother’s claims and said the vaccines were so safe the only side effect of long-term risk was suffering an anaphylactic shock. Chris McKeen/Stuff Auckland University vaccinologist Dr Helen Petousis-Harris told the court it was good luck the children had not caught measles. ....
Pacific health leaders expect a radical overhaul of New Zealand s health system to bring benefits for people of Pacific heritage. The change will mean the 20 district health boards which run services for individual areas around Aotearoa will be replaced by one new body, Health NZ, which will instead plan services for the whole population. Health NZ will have four regional divisions but also district offices. There will also be a new Māori Health Authority, sitting alongside that, to both set policies for Māori health and to decide and fund those who will deliver services. And, on the back of Covid 19, there will be a new Public Health Agency which will target widespread health problems - like smoking - and try to prepare for pandemics and epidemics. ....
And some experts believe that’s what we’re at risk of right now: that a giddy sense of self-satisfaction is blinding us to the fact we are in mortal danger; that we could be caught flat-footed, just as the promised land of a virus-vanquishing vaccine appears. And this is not just about the slumped rates of QR code scanning. It goes to the top, and seeps throughout the whole system, warns one senior doctor. “There s just been this reluctance to engage with anybody else with ideas,” says Professor Des Gorman. “What underpins this reticence? Political risk has driven a culture of ‘best in show’, ‘we re the envy of the world’. It s a very pervasive culture, and it s the wrong culture. The culture we should have is: how do we do better tomorrow than we did yesterday?” ....
How did this happen? New Zealand did not start testing all arrivals until June 9, two months after setting up the Managed Isolation and Quarantine (MIQ) facilities. The 24 days finished on June 16, and, during that time, 5885 people landed in the country. “It’s important to remember that all of those 5885 arrivals did spend 14 days in managed isolation,” says Plank, a Canterbury University maths professor and principal investigator at Te Pūnaha Matatini. “That is what does most of the heavy lifting of reducing the risk of onward transmission in the community, because it’s unlikely – though not impossible – for people to still be infectious more than 14 days after infection.” ....