Whose responsibility?

State leaders and health officials emerge each day to report on what is happening on the ground. They almost all have different approaches now to dealing with the pandemic, and even to dealing with what is perhaps even more important in terms of people’s demands on them: an explanation of how actions correlate with outcomes.

At one end of the spectrum, the virus has jumped the fence into the regions in NSW, and the Berejiklian Government’s attempts to have differentiated responses to different levels of contagion seems to not only not be working, but to be leaving people more confused about all the changing health advice.

At the other end of the spectrum is Victoria, which has gone for the full snap lockdown of the state in the face of unexplained cases in Melbourne, with thousands of potential close contacts, seasoned by the bitter experience of all the lockdowns that have gone before.

/ Prime Minister, Scott Morrison

/ Premier of QLD, Annastacia Palaszczuk

/ Premier of NSW, Gladys Berejiklian

/ Premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews

/ Premier of SA,  Steven Marshall

Gold standard changed again

Meanwhile in Canberra, the Prime Minister appeared at press conferences through the week, and faced questions in Parliament. From the first press conference, we gleaned that we should be seeking to have 70 to 80 per cent of the community vaccinated, and that the federal government now preaches that short, sharp lockdowns are the new gold standard approach for minimising the economic cost of COVID.

There was quite a lot of commentary about how effective those vaccination target numbers actually are, given they only related to 70 or 80 per cent of people over 16, not the whole population. 

But the broader point is that 70 or 80 per cent of the population literally can’t get vaccinated at the moment, even if they wanted to, because we don’t have enough vaccines. The community faces daily onslaughts of pleas from politicians and chief health officers to get vaccinated, then find they can’t.

Public concerns on vaccines

Whatever the faults of the Victorian and NSW governments, the most fundamental unassailable fact is that if Australia had Covid vaccination rates even close to those of the UK or the USA or almost every other OECD country neither state would have been forced to go into lockdown at what should be the home stretch of the race against Covid-19.

Australia secured access to more than enough doses of AZ – in such high demand they had to be secretly airlifted out of the country – and yet somehow this victory was also squandered. In part this was because of irresponsible and alarmist reporting by commentators and “experts” who loudly voiced concerns about its links to rare blood clots despite the infinitesimally tiny level of risk.

Government vaccination rollout promotion

As known, the only way to get out of COVID-19 is to get vaccinated. Higher vaccination rates makes outbreaks much less likely. It also reduces the need for preventive measures, such as border closures and travel restrictions. Just so everyone could get back to normal life, that’s what we understood from the government. 

Apart from the mainstream, they are concerned and not knowledgeable enough about vaccination. According to the 2016 Census of Population and Housing, almost half of Australians (45% or 10.6 million) were born overseas (26% or 6.2 million). It will be important that the CALD communities receive information they can understand, including translated materials. 

We noticed that some of the government organizations released a new campaign – “the Goodbye COVID campaign”. The idea behind the campaign is to encourage people to get jabbed in order to help the community get out of lockdowns and the pandemic. However, the campaign seemed not very efficient and effective. Their most viewed videos on Youtube are below 300 views which indicates the promotion has more room to improve.