Auckland tops 1.5 million doses as tens of thousands turn up for weekend vaccinations

More than 1.5 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine have now been delivered in metro Auckland with almost 74,000 people through the city’s vaccination sites since Friday. Included in these numbers were second dose appointments for the mass vaccination event held last month.

The Northern Region Health Coordination Centre also recorded the one millionth first doses on Sunday in a busy weekend for the city’s vaccination rollout.

Ongoing high numbers through primary care, vaccination sites and other pop-up events also helped to maintain the high weekend numbers.

The weekend in numbers

• Almost 74,000 total vaccinations across Auckland metro (Friday-Sunday)
• Over 14,000 through the Airport Park and Ride and Trusts Arena vaccination sites
• Over 3,700 vaccinations delivered at a four day Tongan pop-up event run by the Fono and the Tongan Health Society
• Over 700 vaccinations at an Auckland University vaccination event for in-residence staff and students. The event continues until Tuesday.

Northern Region Health Coordination Centre Clinical Director Dr Anthony Jordan said it was pleasing that so many Aucklanders had heard the call to get vaccinated this weekend and there was plenty of capacity and availability for the week ahead.

“We have opened up our Airport Park and Ride drive-through and the Trusts Arena to enable those who don’t have an appointment yet to get vaccinated now. We want these sites to continue to be busy to ensure everyone is vaccinated as soon as possible.

“If people would prefer to go to our community vaccination centres, GPs and pharmacies they also have bookings available. Across our sites we have ongoing availability this week at the Otara, Takanini, Auckland CBD, Epsom and Tamaki Vaccination Centres and we would encourage people to book into these sites by going to bookmyvaccine.nz,” he said.

The weekend was also open to all of those people who had their first doses at the mass vaccination event in Manukau last month. Dr Jordan said it would take a couple of days to analyse how many of the weekend’s vaccinations were from those second doses.

“We will need to take a deeper look at the data on Monday but early indications are that over 8,000 people from this group came through again at the weekend.”