Matthew Abraham: Here’s a crazy idea. Why doesn’t the government let us choose which COVID-19 vaccine we want?

Forget all the silly phases. The government should just get on with it and let Australians choose the vaccine they want, writes Matthew Abraham.

No home is complete without a barometer but there’s a trick to making the gadget read correctly.

Using a small screwdriver, turn the tiny screw at the back of the instrument to adjust the dial to your local barometric air pressure reading from the Bureau of Meteorology.

Incredibly, I didn’t know this until recently but our barometer now shifts between Fair and Change with deadly accuracy. So what are you waiting for?

Technically it’s called recalibrating – making small changes to an instrument so it measures accurately.

The Cambridge Dictionary gives a broader meaning of the word: To change the way you do or think about something.

“You need to recalibrate your expectations,” it suggests as an example.

Or “the administration appears to have recalibrated its strategy”.

When Scott Morrison said during the week his government was going to “recalibrate” its COVID-19 vaccine roll-out, he wasn’t twiddling the dial on The Lodge’s barometer. He was twiddling something else.

The PM is recalibrating our crazy expectations that his government might deliver the vaccine smoothly and quickly. In the mouth of the Prime Minister, the word recalibrate is finely calibrated spin. It’s a nice way of saying “it’s bleeding obvious our vaccine rollout is a contradictory, confusing mess so we’re going to have a crack at doing it properly”.

Dr Sunita Thavarajadeva and Nurse Ingrid Sumner from Northern Vaccination Centre in Pooraka. Picture: The Advertiser/ Morgan Sette

While our PM and his bestie South Australian Premier Steven Marshall nut out Vaccination Rollout Version 2.1.6, let’s hope they don’t do the job by halves.

The plan is to have “mass vaccination hubs”, like the decidedly empty one being shown off by Premier Marshall at the Adelaide Showground.

These hubs aren’t expected to open their doors to the unwashed masses until vaccine supplies increase, sometime later this year. Why take so long?

The optimistically tagged national Cabinet is now putting the national COVID-19 rollout strategy on, wait for it, a “war footing”.

Over-50s, those Australians cooling our heels in Phase 2a of the vaccine schedule, will be free to get the AstraZeneca vaccination sooner.

This is despite the fact thousands of high-priority people in Phase 1a and 1b, such as frontline health care workers, the elderly and disabled, are still to receive the vaccine.

That’s if they now want it, because some days our leaders seem to be doing their best to spook the horses.

When these wonderful vaccines first became available, we were promised they’d be the magic pathway back to normal life.

But a fortnight ago, federal Health Minister Greg Hunt said our international borders could remain shut even if the entire population was vaccinated.

“Vaccination alone is no guarantee that you can open up,” he said.

“If the whole country were vaccinated, you couldn’t just open the borders. We still have to look at a series of different factors: transmission, longevity (of vaccine protection) and the global impact. And those are factors which the world is learning about.”

He may be a smart guy but this is a dopey message from a government that says it wants us all to hurry up and get our COVID shots.

If we can’t leave and we can’t return – remember roughly 36,000 Australians are still stranded overseas – and if we’re living in a country with laughably low cases of community transmission of the virus, and that’s in distant Perth, what’s the big hurry?

The snap decision to abandon the AstraZeneca vaccine for under 50s because of a handful of blood clotting cases has only added to the confusion.

People already talk about wanting the “good vaccine” – the Pfizer shot – not the “dodgy vaccine”, even though the AstraZeneca is also a very good vaccine.

Here’s a crazy idea – why don’t we all get a choice?

In a well-argued letter to The Advertiser on April 16, 67-year-old Adelaide GP, Dr Mathilde Schaefer-Buss says she’s concerned about the blood clot risk and is “absolutely appalled there is no option to access the Pfizer vaccine”, apart from at hospital hubs in SA, not at respiratory clinics or GPs.

“We all worry about clots and, therefore, may have chosen not to have a pregnancy and not to take hormones to avoid the risk of a clot,” she writes. “Yet now we cannot choose.”

While the PM is recalibrating, why not throw the vaccine doors wide open? Give us an informed choice of vaccines and dump the silly “Phases” for jabs. Open the hubs and get the Army to handle shipping the vaccine because they’re brilliant at logistics.

Set the dial from Confused to Fair and let’s get on with it.