 Moving outside Africa now, New Zealand will end its strict coronavirus lockdown measures and restore more freedoms only when 90% of its eligible population is fully vaccinated. The country will move into a new traffic light system to manage outbreaks in regions as soon as the target is reached. Vaccine certificates will be central to the new system, according to Prime Minister Jacinda Arden. We can rightfully be proud of what our world-leading response has achieved. But two things have changed since then. The first is that Delta has made it very hard to maintain our elimination strategy. Its tentacles have reached into our communities and made it hard to shake, even using the best public health measures and the toughest restrictions we had available to us. But right as our long-standing strategy was challenged, we also had a new tool, one that means as COVID has changed, we could change too. And rather than being locked down, we could move forward safely and with confidence. That tool is the vaccine. The more people who are vaccinated, the harder it is for COVID to spread through communities quickly and find our most vulnerable. That means while we used to say that we needed to stay home to save lives, we now need to be vaccinated to save lives.