Giving up his retirement plans to fight COVID-19

Jamal Rifi loves his front yard. Its neat circular driveway, walking outside in the morning to see sun and greenery. But for the past 18 months, he hasn’t seen the green because it has been covered by two enormous tents. And they are the COVID kind; drive through tents for swabbing and testing patients. And he keeps having to make them bigger.

The race to vaccinate Canterbury Bankstown

In February last year, when news started coming out about a pandemic in China, Dr Rifi knew he had to act quickly. He knew his multicultural community was high risk. “I lived in an area that is extremely vulnerable for people arriving from China,” Dr Rifi says. 

In June, when the deadly Delta variant hit, Dr Rifi knew the race was on to vaccinate as many people as possible as quickly as possible. And he knew how difficult that would be to communicate to certain sectors of his community. There were mixed messages from the government and a “bombardment of misinformation”.

Dr Rifi and his staff are working hard to vaccinate their community

‘Arm yourself’ can mean get a gun

Dr Rifi says, “the government should have done better. They should have developed a media strategy for Australians of non-English background”. Dr Rifi is particularly critical of the government’s “arm yourself” advertising campaign.

“For years we were working with countering violent extremism. And some genius in Canberra comes in and says ‘arm yourself’. How am I going to translate this in Arabic? Arm yourself, that means get a gun,” he says.

When Dr Rifi posted a photograph of himself being vaccinated he was viciously trolled. Of that and the protest rallies he says, “There’s no vaccine against stupidity”.

Meanwhile in south-west Sydney, he has been working night and day, seven days a week, to protect the lives of his diverse community.

Dr Rifi and his team