“I do have a little bit of anxiety about having to scale back too severely if we were to continue to ramp-up too quickly,” he said at a press conference from the Beehive on Wednesday afternoon.
“At the moment I’m feeling reasonably comfortable that where we’re at, we should have enough to get us through June before those big [vaccine] deliveries arrive.
“But if the DHBs continue to outperform their targets by a big margin – and that margin continues to grow – then the risk of having a week or two where we have to scale back, that becomes a more real possibility.”
At the moment, the Ministry of Health’s vaccine rollout operation is tracking ahead of schedule.
By Monday, May 16, DHBs had set a collective target of having administered 414,824 coronavirus vaccine doses. The actual number of doses administered at this stage was 449,139 – more than 34,000 doses more than planned.