the school. One of the things the review team will look at—and the Ministry of Health are already looking at this as part of their own debriefing process—is whether having additional categories of contact added to confusion. The key message overall here needs to be that people should follow the advice that is given to them by public health officials because it will be different depending on people’s individual circumstances. So, yes, there will be broad advice that’s issued to everybody, but where people are contacted by public health then they should follow the advice that they are given specifically by public health. That would certainly be aided if they responded to messages that they get from public health.
CHRIS BISHOP (National): Thank you. I want to ask the Minister around the legal regime and self-isolation and testing. Dr Bloomfield says that medical officers of health have delegated authority from him and that orders to self-isolate and get tested are within the parameters of section 70 of the Health Act—that was at the press conference last week. Dr Andrew Geddis from the University of Otago has cast doubt on that proposition. We’re told that a section 70 order was formally issued last week, but was publicly unavailable for quite some time, and then we had Dr Bloomfield at the press conference in which the decision was made to go from level 3 in Auckland to level 2, again, actually formally issuing a formal section 70 order orally and then it was subsequently uploaded to the website, which I suppose makes people wonder why that had to happen in the first place, later on, if the section 70 orders were made orally by medical officers of health in the first place. So two questions, firstly—
SPEAKER: Order! Order! The member’s time has expired.
Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister for COVID-19 Response): Just very briefly responding to that, the member is, to some extent, asking for a legal opinion, and I best not venture into that territory. But what I would say is the advice that I have received is that a medical officer of health can give an order verbally, and somebody needs to follow that. So that is an enforceable order if it is given verbally.
Hon JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’d like to start by congratulating the Minister on securing the 8 million Pfizer vaccines that he mentioned in his statement. I think that offers a great deal of reassurance to the country that the light is indeed at the end of the tunnel. I also want to say congratulations, Minister, on securing the Pfizer vaccine as opposed to some of the others on the market, because, apparently, the evidence shows that it’s about 95 percent effective versus 65 percent for some of the competing products. So I think that is very reassuring.
Now that those have been secured, can the Minister tell the House anything about the way in which the roll-out is going to occur for those vaccines and, in particular, looking at regimes similar to where they have in Australia, where people kind of pre-qualify and are told which group they’re in and are told, roughly, when that’s going to happen, and have the kind of assurance that comes from knowing when it is that you’re going to be receiving the vaccine?
Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister for COVID-19 Response): The Government’s already released the sequencing framework for the first group of people who are going to be getting the COVID-19 Pfizer vaccine in the first quarter of this year. That work is already under way. So it starts with our border workers, first and foremost. We’re sitting somewhere about 90 percent of the way through doing that, having had the absolute latest numbers based on today’s experiences. But, certainly, we’re about 90 percent of the way through that, and we’ve made a start on their family and close contacts—you know, the household contacts of those people—and also on some of our front-line health workers. So the people who are involved in taking COVID-19 test swabs—those who are more at risk because they’re on the front lines of the health services. So that’s going to take us through the first quarter. We then start to move into the second quarter, where we’re
