The Stuff website reported from Maxine Jacobs on the 6th November that whilst there are more Pakeha unvaccinated that Maori are being stigmatised for not being vaccinated as shown in the excerpts copied below from that report.
While Maori are facing increasing pressure from the public to get vaccinated, figures show the ethnic group with the highest number of unvaccinated people is Pakeha.
South Auckland GP and Auckland University Associate Professor Dr Matire Harwood was shocked by the unvaccinated numbers for Pakeha.
She’s been so focused on raising Māori vaccine rates; she never took notice of Pakeha rates, until now.
Dr Matire Harwood says there has been no central leadership to stop Maori bearing the brunt of the nation’s frustration about the unvaccinated.
The narrative that Maori were the unvaccinated across the nation was unfair, she said, and was empowering some to be bold in their racism.
Harwood works with the Papakura Marae Health Centre, and has been fielding vaccination questions and helping Covid-positive whanau as the virus spreads across Auckland.
As well as receiving aggressive emails from people lashing out at Maori who were undecided about the vaccine, she has seen racism hurled at whanau in her community.
She said the representation of Maori across the media and the Government has given people ammunition to attack unvaccinated Maori.
“We’re being stigmatised while everyone’s celebrating 90 per cent for the population.”
Those in positions of power could have been the leaders and changed the narrative, but they didn’t, Harwood said.
“I do worry. We have been a team of 5 million and that’s worked, but I’m concerned we’re not going to get that back.”
In terms of population percentage, Maori have had a slower uptake.
Pakeha were 11.4 per cent off reaching 100 per cent, compared to Maori who were 27.7 per cent off, the Ministry of Health figures showed.
A health and social response to the pandemic was necessary now, alongside the other targeted campaigns for Maori, rangatahi and young men.
Blaming an ethnicity for the spreading of the virus or being unvaccinated isn’t the right way to move forward.
Given the above let’s look at the facts of the matter!
Since the earliest days of the pandemic we have been told repeatedly by the government and by leaders in the Maori community that Maori are more susceptible to infection from the Covid virus and how they need to have special attention to combat this risk.
We have seen the government spend huge sums of money, specifically targeted at Maori, to try to eliminate this level of risk and yet here we are nearly two years on with the risk still there due to low levels of vaccination within the Maori community.
We see the government putting in place incentive programs with rewards to try to raise the vaccination levels within the Maori community to at least ninety per cent. Unfortunately these incentive programs are still yet to achieve their desired result of ninety per cent vaccination rates.
To now start bleating about the numbers and to try to say that Pakeha rates of unvaccinated are much worse is nothing short of insulting.
There is always going to be a significant difference in the overall numbers of unvaccinated given that Maori make up only about 16% of the population in total and that the eligible numbers of Pakeha make up 65% of the population.
But when we look at the true statistics overall from the Ministry of Health figures, they show that Pakeha were 11.4 per cent off reaching 100 per cent, compared to Maori who were 27.7 per cent off.
Whilst there is a larger number of Pakeha that are unvaccinated overall that is because there is a much larger number of people that make up the Pakeha population in total.
The fact that there is a larger number of Pakeha unvaccinated doesn’t in itself mean that to criticise the Maori vaccination rates is racism or that they are being stigmatised because of that criticism.
The government and Maori themselves, early on in the pandemic, identified that they believed there was a much higher risk to Maori from the Covid virus and that they needed specific targeted assistance based on ethnicity to combat that risk.
To criticise that program of targeted assistance for not achieving the desired results cannot be called racism just because that program was based on a specific ethnic group (in this case Maori), yet that is what is happening here in this case.
They should realise that it is not the ethnicity that is being criticised it is the fact that the program has failed! We can then move on and identify why it failed and do something about ensuring we fix it so that failure doesn’t carry on into the future.
We all need to get over the victim mentality and move on to identify the reasons for failure and put in place measures to combat that failure independent of any specific ethnicities involved.