Leading Māori health professionals are appalled the Ministry of Health has delayed releasing all available vaccination data to Māori that could be crucial to their survival.
Whānau Ora commissioning agency Chief Executive, John Tamihere Photo: Twitter / Te Whānau O Waipareira
It comes as the Whānau Ora commissioning agency received a portion of data from the Ministry showing over 52,000 Māori between Waikato and Auckland were unvaccinated.
Managing director at Te Kohao Health, Lady Tureiti Moxon, said the ministry had neglected te tiriti o Waitangi by not meaningfully working with Māori.
She said not having the data has meant Māori providers have been stabbing in the dark while community lives are on the line.
"Either you have us at the table, you share resources, you share power, you share decision making with us- if you don't do that then it is a breach of te tiriti o waitangi.
"I don't know what it is going to take for the government to understand and know that unless they treat Māori as a true partner as intended by te tiriti o waitangi we will always have to fight.
"You know we're all supposed to be in this together, but for some reason the ministry has been so hesitant about giving us that data," she said.
Moxon was also critical of past data that the ministry had been releasing to providers as there were concerns it wasn't always accurate and didn't provide a full and detailed description of where Māori were sitting during the outbreak.
But she said it was essential that Māori had all the data available regardless so they could reach those who either needed a little prompting, or in some cases couldn't access the vaccine.
"Quite often the data that we do get is lacking, it's not actually accurate data.
"But what data they do have, should be shared with us so that we can get out there and look after our people.
"Who are more passionate about Māori people than us? Who cares as much as Māori do about what might happen, what could happen and what is happening to us right now? she said.
But the Whānau Ora commissioning agency is going to court for the second time tomorrow, to fight again for details of all eligible Maori who are not yet vaccinated.
Whānau Ora commissioning agency Chief Executive, John Tamihere was frustrated that it took a court case for at least some of the data to be released and that the ministry was not willingly helping Māori providers to efficiently vaccinate their communities by releasing all the data.
He told morning report that from the beginning Māori providers on the ground had been struggling with the ministry's modelling and now they were facing further brick walls as they tried to combat the growing number of Māori testing positive for Covid 19.
"Mr Bloomfield is in control of a whole shop, so when they resist, we just hit a brick wall.
"Final common sense has been applied to this but by court order, not by any buarocratic common sense.
"We were always going to struggle on all modelling...on all modelling we knew we were running into a brick wall" he said.
One of the key reasons the ministry had initially refused to hand over the Māori vaccination data was due to concerns that it would inflict upon people's privacy and that some Māori representative groups had been reluctant to share their information.
But both Moxon and Tamihere say this is not a viable reason as a majority of iwi and Māori representatives have reached a common understanding and are calling for the data to be put into Māori hands.
Managing director at Te Kohao Health, Lady Tureiti Moxon Photo: Supplied
Māori Covid-19 analyst, Dr Rawiri Taonui agreed.
He said it was unacceptable that the Ministry of Health had compromised Māori vaccination efforts by not handing over data immediately.
He believed the Ministry wasn't listening to Māori health experts and the vaccination data should have been handed over months ago.
"It's very unfortunate and the court case is going to proceed because we need to understand why the big delay, because the big delay has slowed down the Māori vaccination effort and it's compromising the Māori effort against delta.
"The data should have been handed over several months ago" he said.
According to Taonui the Māori make up more than 50 percent of new cases every day, have the highest active number of cases, will have the highest hospitalization rates probably by the end of this month and already have the largest number of delta deaths.
When comparing population to numbers in the outbreak he said, Māori are 3.8 times more likely to catch delta, 4.2 times more likely to be hospitalized and 3.7 times more likely to die than the national average.
Māori Covid-19 analyst, Dr Rawiri Taonui Photo: Supplied
Another issue on the minds of Māori providers was the effect of home isolation to which Tamihere said around 2,000 Māori were currently isolating at home.
But there was push back from Māori professionals crown organizations who insisted they were providing the appropriate welfare services to Māori communities.
"The biggest issue that we have in our country is that we've got people who think they know us well and they don't.
"That's one of the biggest criticisms we've had through-out our waitangi tribunal hearings... we've got people who absolutely believe whole-heartedly that they know what's best for us, people that know what's best for Māori are Māori" she said.
Moxon thought that if a meaningful partnership and collaboration with Māori had been prioritised by the government from the beginning, Māori would have been a lot further ahead rather than behind.
Both her and Taonui also were on the same page about the upcoming introduction of the traffic light system and the Auckland borders opening where they were very concerned that these two shifts were premature.
Moxon said something had to be done now, otherwise Māori would suffer the consequences.
"The thing is, in the end lives are at stake here, unless we get support to be able to target and get people to where they need to be and get our people across the line.
"We're going to end up being a very sad population of people simply because lives will be lost," said Moxon.