(Reuters) – New Zealand began its official deployment of Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine on Saturday, while Australia finalized plans to begin vaccinations on Monday, a new phase in tackling the virus affecting both countries. largely contained.
A small group of medical professionals were injected in Auckland on Friday ahead of the wider deployment that officially began on Saturday with border staff and so-called Managed Isolation and Quarantine (MIQ) employees, officials said.
In Australia, hotel quarantine and health workers will also be the first group to be vaccinated at 16 Pfizer vaccination centers across the country, along with older Australians in aged care institutions.
“Today we begin the largest vaccination program in our history by vaccinating the first of our frontier workers, a critical step to protect everyone in Aotearoa,” New Zealand Health Minister Ashley Bloomfield told reporters in Auckland. using the country’s native Maori name. .
“We will move through the first few days and weeks in a measured way to make sure our systems and processes are solid.”
New Zealand expects its nationwide rollout of 5 million inhabitants to last a full year, while Australia wants to vaccinate its 25 million citizens by October.
Despite tens of thousands of tests, no new COVID-19 infections have been reported in the communities of any country, despite tens of thousands of tests.
Both countries ended local locks this week after a group emerged from a quarantine hotel in Melbourne and when the New Zealand authorities investigated how a kind of highly communicable British variant was found in three members of a family in Auckland.
The two countries are among the top 10 worldwide in a COVID-19 performance index for their successful handling of the pandemic.
Australia reported just under 29,000 cases and 909 deaths, while New Zealand recorded just 26 deaths from 2,350 cases.
Reporting by Paulina Duran in Sydney; Edited by Lincoln Feast.