LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

• Published date: 04 November 2021
• Publication title: Northland Age, The

Also as usual a good one from Peter Jackson, but sadly the people I talked to and remarked on the articles made me realise that not many buy or read the Northland Age. On Tuesday I spent 20 minutes waiting for my husband in the old Warehouse carpark, I was so amazed at the number of people that were going in for the vaccine. It was great to see, and I saw several teenagers as well as older folk.

I have family in the UK and they have all contracted COVID-19. All were vaccinated and said it was no worse than the normal flu that they get most years, one of them is undergoing cancer treatment and he is doing just fine. I was born in 1949, so I had a polio jab, then there was smallpox, then tuberculosis and I can remember my mother saying how lucky we were that there were so many clever people in the world who produced these wonderful vaccines that saved so many lives.

Then today I collect my Age, and what do I see? All those people at Waitangi and certainly not keeping two metres away from others.

So what is the answer ? Bribery hasn’t worked and sadly the world is in a bad place and for how long, goodness only knows, but I am sure our only chance is the vaccine. I have family in Australia and many of us have family all over the world, so we have to have something to help us think positively. What else have we got apart from the vaccine?

Sue C

Northland

Nincompoops take noteOn Tuesday, November 2, our Prime Minister was heckled by COVID-19-ignorant and anti-vaccine nincompoops in Kawakawa and the Far North was taken into level 3 lockdown because of ill-defined positive COVID cases within the locked-down area.

Three significant reports from overseas of the consequences of not being fully vaccinated against the pernicious Delta variant of the Sars-CoV-2 virus had been recently available by then.

Firstly, the Clalit Research Institute, in collaboration with researchers from Harvard University, had analysed one of the world’s largest integrated health record databases to examine the safety of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine against COVID-19 — the vaccine used in New Zealand.

The study provides the largest peer-reviewed evaluation of the safety of a COVID-19 vaccine in a nationwide mass-vaccination setting. It was conducted in Israel and was a study of millions of anonymised electronic and comprehensive medical records.

In contrast to the relatively small number of adverse effects associated with the vaccine, high rates of multiple serious adverse events were...