Health officials are warning current low vaccine coverage and lack of vaccination personnel means a major measles outbreak won't be prevented or managed.
Statistics from, Te Whatu Ora on MMR (Measles, mumps, rubella) from February 1 show a shocking one-third of Māori children under the age of four are not fully immunised, along with a quarter of Pasifika children.
Asian children had the highest vaccination rate at 84% and European and other at 80% but the 77% total was a far cry from the 95% needed for herd immunity.
While there was a particularly urgent need for vaccinators in the Central Region — which stretched from Hawkes Bay to Wellington — Pacific and Māori providers were also challenged.
Covid-19 was where providers had focused their work and now they were playing catch-up for other vaccinations.
Cherry Elisaia from South Seas Healthcare said they were working collectively with seven other Pacific providers to get to the 30,000 cases that were overdue for scheduled immunisations.
"The extra mile is going to the door, that's what we learned in Covid," she said.
"We have to go to our families. If that means sending a team out, if we have tried every attempt to get to our families and they are not responding, we have to go to their doors."
Tagaloa Dr Andrew Chan Mow from South Seas Healthcare said more workforce was needed to do the job because of the huge amount of work that needed to be done.
There were also challenges around Pacific people who might be off the radar or families who were not registered with primary care.
He said the meningococcal B vaccine campaign drive around 2004 was successful because of door knocking by Pacific primary healthcare providers.
"That's not rocket science — we do need workforce and funding to do this work," he said.
It's a pressing need for potentially life-saving work.
For more on this story, watch the video at the top of this article.
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