THE VACCINE REFUSAL CAPITAL

Welcome to Takaka, white sand and vaccine refusal capital of New Zealand.

Spot a six-year-old in the hippy holiday spot and there’s almost a 50/50 chance they won’t have had their recommended disease jabs.

New data shows that, in 2018, 44 per cent of Takaka five-year-olds were not fully immunised. Not because they couldn’t make it to the doctor, but because their parents made a conscious choice to decline the vaccinations.

With a national average of about six per cent of parents rejecting scheduled jabs, that makes the Golden Bay town of 1300 New Zealand’s hottest vaccine refusal hotspot. In the middle of a national measles outbreak, it also puts enormous pressure on health workers, knowing they must immediately contain any suspected cases or risk the disease’s rapid spread.

We are on a knife edge on a daily basis, Nelson Marlborough District Health Board associate director of nursing

Jill Clendon

Hoping that nothing comes into our community and, if it does, that we are able to get on top of it very, very quickly.

The vaccine decline data - obtained by Stuff under the Official Information Act - shows parents are most likely to refuse vaccines in communities around Tasman, Coromandel, Bay of Plenty, Northland and some parts of Waikato.

The numbers reinforce the idea that anti-vaccination hotspots are often concentrated in alternative lifestyle communities who try to live “natural” lives. While suburbs with high vaccine refusal rates tend to have higher than average proportions of Europeans, hotspots are far from universally white.