mattwnz:

 

Although that maybe true, when they give these vaccine out, I don't think they have ver given out different versions of covid vaccine to pacific islanders.

 

Yes indeed, that's another tradeoff. Do we go to the expense of having separate vaccines for some minority or other? If yes, you're asking your GPs or Practice Nurses to correctly assess the genetic makeup of the patient.

 

 Plus they are supposed to be tested by the manufactures anyway with their trials, and how is a small countries testig processes going to be much better than that anyway.

 

Yes indeed. But how many Pacific Islanders or Eskimos or Zulu or Crimean Tartars are going to be in a study of (say) 100,000?

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They also have a big pacific island population in Australia. IMO they should probably merge with Australia, which is now common for many things like this to get economies of scale and speed. 

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They also have a large Aboriginal population in Australia, whilst in NZ it's minimal. Would you like to pay more for medicines because they're safe for Aboriginals?

The original post was about Medsafe considering the new vaccine. I expect that "considering" it mostly involve looking at what other countries have done (approved/declined) and the reasons they've given for that, and then looking at NZ's unique situation to see if there's any reason to do differently from the other countries. In a few cases where the outcome wasn't obvious, they might run a trial themselves or ask the manufacturer to do so.