If the country’s first mass vaccination event is anything to go by, we might have a problem; because they couldn’t find enough people wanting to get the covid jab to fill the event. 

This event is scheduled for Friday, at the Vodafone events centre and it’s supposed to vaccinate 15,500 people over one weekend.

At the start, health officials sent invitations to 12,500 people. Only around 3000 booked a spot, which is less than a quarter.

So health officials widened the net. They invited 82,000 people. Still they couldn’t find enough people who wanted to fill he spots.

So they widened it again and invited 140,000 people, and they managed to get the numbers they needed.

I reckon this is might be what we’re going to find as we roll the vaccine out. There is no urgency out there to get the jab.

Because why would you? Nothing much is going to change once you get it, the government’s made that clear. 

Even if we’re all jabbed at the end of this year, life in the Hermit Kingdom carries on largely the way it has for the last 16 months: the borders stay closed, MIQ continues operating, maybe you get a shorter MIQ stay if you’re jabbed, but equally maybe you don’t.

So what’s the incentive to get the jab? 

Obviously this would change the minute the Delta variant breaks out in New Zealand 

That would likely provide the urgency to get vaccinated.

But I suspect, if that doesn’t happen, we might end up having the same trouble as every vaccinating country bar one; which is that we hit about a vaccination rate of about 60% and we just can’t get it any higher.

That’s not great for us. It makes it so much harder to break out of our golden cage, because we might not have the levels of vaccine cover we need to start letting jabbed travellers in without going through quarantine.

If ever there was a reason for the government to be very clear with us on what it thinks happens next, this is it.

Because frankly, for many people, unless there’s a threat, there may be no compelling reason to vaccinate.

Don’t believe me?  Give me another reason why 75% of invited people couldn’t be bothered going to that jab event.