New Zealand is the latest country to focus its intense vaccination efforts into a single day. In August, Tunisia vaccinated more than 500,000 people in one day, and this month India said it had given 25 million shots on a single day to mark Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s birthday.
As of Wednesday, 50 percent of New Zealand’s eligible population had received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech shot, the only vaccine the country is using, while 80 percent had received a single dose.
New Zealand is also cutting the time between receiving a first and second dose, to three weeks, from six — a shift that means “more people can be fully vaccinated sooner, increasing our community immunity,” a health ministry official said in a statement.
The country is currently administering about 17,000 first doses and about 46,000 second doses a day, according to the most recent data. Its rate of first vaccination doses has been dwindling, down more than three-fourths from an August high of about 67,000 doses a day.
New Zealand has not set a vaccine target or a date at which to ease restrictions, although Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on Tuesday that the country would introduce a national vaccine certificate that would be required for entry into “high-risk settings” like summer music festivals.