Lake Brunner on the west coast is home to the Gloriavale Christian community and was once one of the least vaccinated areas.
When data on the country’s most and least vaccinated areas came out in late November, Lake Brunner was the worst in the South Island, with only half of its roughly 600 residents fully vaccinated.
Nationally, only Murupara was worse.
Gloriavale represents at least one-third of people aged 12 or older in the Lake Brunner area.
Gloriavale’s secretive and reclusive Christian community had long shunned all vaccinations.
Liz Gregory, head of the Gloriavale Leavers’ Support Trust, said worldview explained the low uptake of the Covid-19 vaccine in the community.
“For 50 years they were taught very firmly that it was wrong to get vaccinated, and that permeated the community and their belief system, and now it has become like a religious belief.
“So when the pandemic came and the vaccines came out, there was definitely a feeling that it was wrong. If people were going to catch them, they were putting their souls in danger of eternal damnation and there was a bit of a fear around the vaccine too.”
But when the government introduced vaccination mandates for the education and health sectors, it threatened to close schools in Gloriavale and cost the community the funding that came with them.
It caused a change of heart in the community, Gregory said.
“It’s a commercial structure with a religious veneer,” she said.
“The business actually means a lot to them. The finances mean a lot to them and they have four kindergartens and they run a school, and they’re government funded and they were going to risk losing what we found out is millions dollars if they had to close their preschools because their teachers weren’t vaccinated.”
That didn’t mean the decision didn’t come with a lot of trepidation for the community. It had caused a lot of dissension and discussion, Gregory said.
But the closure of schools would also have had repercussions throughout the community and its way of life.
“Obviously the second factor of a group like Gloriavale is the spin around their need for funding, so they have a structure put in place – their working structure – it’s an economic unit, it has a life of its own but it requires everyone to work,” Gregory said.
“So the mums in Gloriavale send their kids to kindergarten and… to school, and the mums work and they work very hard. So it was never likely that Gloriavale would say ‘let’s not get vaccinated and shut down our kindergartens and schools” because all of a sudden their whole functioning is affected – who is going to do the work?”
Community leaders communicated the policy change — though it caused disruption even within community leadership — and rolled up their own sleeves to deal with the issue, Gregory said.
The Lake Brunner area also featured the odd little settlement and many farms – the exact type of remote, rural locality that vaccinators had struggled to reach across the country during deployment.
But the mandate had worked and the region was now moving up the immunization tables with 80% of over-12s having received two doses and 91% at least one.
Helen Gillespie, manager of the West Coast District Health Board’s Covid-19 vaccination program, said the mandates had helped boost vaccination rates in remote areas of the coast.
“There are a myriad of reasons why these things have changed, not the least of which is the mandate,” she said.
“When we’ve been to the communities, our clinical staff offer a conversation. So a person may show up but we can’t vaccinate them that day. They may have come just to ask the clinical team questions. .. The Lake Brunner area is no different than any other outreach location, so we gave people the opportunity to ask questions and gave people time to make up their minds.”
As a result, some were still showing up to get a first dose, she said.
RNZ attempted to contact Gloriavale and its leader, Howard Temple, but they had no interest in participating.
Whatever the reason for the change in stance on vaccination, there was no doubt that a remote community with limited access to health care, like Gloriavale, would benefit from the preventative protection of vaccination.
University of Auckland epidemiologist Rod Jackson said that was why he had been so supportive of the mandates.
“Just because internationally they have proven to be very successful and what you just described about Gloriavale is the perfect example of how they can work,” he said.
However, he stressed that there was no single way to vaccinate hesitant communities, and while mandates were a useful tool, they were not a silver bullet.
Gloriavale was a unique case and evidence showed that in most marginalized communities, educating and gaining support from community leaders was the real key to overcoming vaccine hesitancy, Professor Jackson said.