A top Māori researcher believes if the Delta outbreak spreads any further into unvaccinated Māori communities the situation could worsen to something similar to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic .📷
Speaking to Breakfast on Friday Dr Rawiri Taonui said 60 per cent of Māori between 12 and 34 remain unvaccinated.
However, Taonui noted despite the low statistic, Māori vaccination rates have jumped almost 20 per cent in the last three weeks.
Taonui says he believes the current percentage of Māori who are fully vaccinated is just over 30 per cent.
“It’s lower than what the Government says because the health service user index the health industry uses excludes people who haven’t used the health service for the past year or year before and that amounts to up to 200,000 New Zealanders, the largest proportion of which are Māori and Pasifika,” Taonui said.
“It’s important to know those numbers so our communities know what they’re dealing with and they can strategise and move forward.”
Recent studies suggest an unvaccinated person is up to 27 times more likely to contract the virus than someone fully vaccinated; a figure Taonui said is present in Auckland’s Māori community.
“It’s spreading into the marginalised periphery of the Māori community and that has happened during the second week of the move to Level 3 in Auckland,” he said.
“The thing that tells us that are the number of random cases that are turning up in hospitals, cases amongst the gang community, cases amongst transitional housing.
"That tells us the spread has gone into the Māori community.
“It’s been disguised under Level 3 because many more people are moving around in Auckland and crossing the borders and it places us at huge risk.”
That risk is multiplied by the fact Māori are at a higher risk to the virus, Taonui said.
“If we’re to factor in the vulnerabilities of Māori, then your chances of being hospitalised are probably more than 100 times more likely than a fully vaccinated person to end up in hospital,” he said.
“Those are really serious numbers and with the case confirmed in Whāngarei last night and Delta already in four or five towns in the Waikato, there’s a real risk of Delta moving into high demographic Māori areas with very low rates of vaccination; Northland, the lakes district, Bay of Plenty, the King Country and Taranaki.
“If we start seeing more than 50 cases a day and then maybe 100, then we’re looking at a various serious situation akin to 1918’s Spanish flu in my opinion.”
It's estimated approximately 9,000 Kiwis died in the 1918 pandemic with approximately 27 per cent [2500] of the deceased being Māori.
A Whānau-focused approach
Taonui said the key to getting more Māori vaccinated is treating people as whānau and showing genuine concern and care for the situation.
“Where that has occurred earlier in the current outbreak with Māori health providers essentially breaking the rules at that stage, there is evidence of some very high vaccination rates,” he said.
“Where people haven’t been able to access Māori health providers, the rates are actually much lower.
“It’s important to take the vaccine to the whānau rather than expect the whānau to go to the vaccination centre.”
Taonui said that approach had been implemented in both the US and Canada for their indigenous populations and had seen plenty of success with both North American nations approximately 20 per cent ahead in indigenous vaccination rates over New Zealand for Māori.
“In the US last year, the infection rate amongst native American Indians was 3.5 times higher than the general population.
"So when it came to vaccination this year, what the US government did was give the vaccines to the Indian health service providers and left it up to them to decide who got vaccinated,” Taonui said.
“What they did very early on was congregate communities together and vaccinate everyone of eligible age and over all together and already by June, they’d reach 40 per cent vaccination rate and we were still starting.
“That’s the approach we needed here.”
Taonui said that approach had been taken up by some Māori healthcare providers early on with some locations such as the East Coast already having between 70 and 80 per cent of their Māori population vaccinated before the current Delta outbreak had even started.
He added while that approach wasn’t taken on by the Government initially. They’ve changed their approach in recent weeks to be more inline with a whānau-focused mindset and are getting results.
“We’ve gone up nearly 20 per cent in the last three weeks which is about 50 per cent higher than the increase in the Pākehā rate.”
On top of that, Taonui said action from whānau themselves towards indecisive family members has helped.
“I’ve been talking to a lot of people over the last week and a half and they’ve been saying, ‘we’ve got whānau sitting on the fence',” he said.
“I’m saying to them push them off the fence and make sure they land on the right side.”
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