Covid-19: Ministry's 'wait and see' view of Māori vaccination, court told

Tuesday, 26 October 2021

The organisation John Tamihere heads wants information on unvaccinated Māori so services can be offered straight to them. (File photo)

Some Māori health providers face going door to door to find people who have not been vaccinated against Covid-19 because the Ministry of Health won’t give it the information, a Māori health advocate says.

The ministry has the information to more efficiently find unvaccinated Māori, but has not yet given it to the dozens of providers working for government-funded Whānau Ora, which coordinates family-centred social and health services for Māori. .

The Whānau Ora Commissioning Agency, an umbrella organisation with a network of nearly 100 Māori health providers in the North Island, has asked the High Court in Wellington to order the ministry reconsider its decision not to share personal information that could be used to trace individuals and communities most in need.

The agency is led by John Tamihere and its providers, which include his West Auckland-based Waipareira Trust, had given 496,000 Covid-19 vaccinations as of October 18.

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In court on Monday, Crown lawyer Sean Kinsler said the ministry had decided that so far it was neither appropriate nor necessary to share the data the agency wanted. But that was being assessed against daily Covid-19 information, he said.

It was a case of “wait and see”, not “wait and do nothing,” Kinsler said.

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Some district health board heads suggested that releasing the information could further erode trust in the system and alienate people who thought their privacy had been breached, he said.

They also suggested this could lead to bullying in communities with diverse views if vaccination teams were seen going to certain houses, Kinsler said.

But the agency’s lawyer, Jonathan Orpin-Dowell, said providing phone numbers and email addresses would mean the unvaccinated would not be publicly identified.

Kinsler said the other providers were also asking the ministry for data but not to the same level of detail.

So far the others were willing to use soon-to-be available anonymised information for areas covering between 100 and 200 people, and perhaps smaller numbers in future, he said.

That could include how many in the area were unvaccinated Māori, Kinsler said.

But Orpin-Dowell said the agency would have to go door to door in the area to find them.

Orpin-Dowell told Justice Cheryl Gwyn that Māori were significantly behind the general population in having vaccinations, even though some progress has been made.

As at last Wednesday Māori were 17 per cent of the population but 44 per cent of active cases in the current Covid-19 outbreak, he said. It was critical there was a kaupapa Māori option for vaccinations, he said.

Orpin-Dowell asked for the ministry’s decision to be set aside, as it was flawed and inconsistent with the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi.

Some information the agency wanted was already provided to Healthline, a private company contracted to the ministry, for the purpose of arranging vaccinations, Orpin-Dowell told the judge. Some agency health providers also had the same type of individual information to follow up missed standard childhood vaccinations, he said.

The judge said she would give her decision as soon as possible.