Miranda Devine: Get Rudd and Turnbull to fix the vaccine mess

It’s time for the Morrison Government to embrace Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull and let them loose on the world in search of a faster vaccine supply, writes Miranda Devine.

It would have been a good idea for the PM to make Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull Australia’s Vaccine ambassadors.

Before you choke on your coffee, hear me out.

As Sun Tzu, the legendary Chinese military strategist said, it is wise to “keep your friends close and your enemies closer”.

There’s no doubt at this stage that both former PMs are enemies of Scott Morrison, for their own unique reasons, and that they are working together as a team to do him in.

Like Statler and Waldorf from the Muppets they are going to keep sniping from the peanut gallery. Perfect. Direct their passion to a useful end.

Former prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull. Picture: AAP Image/Mick Tsikas

Clearly, they both have talents and unspent energy, not to mention useful connections in America. In a time of crisis, it is a waste to leave them sitting on the sidelines. The devil makes work for idle hands, as the Old English proverb says, and insufferable Rudd’s leaked letter to Pfizer is just one example.

Make the pair useful. Give them an important title and a big cheque and set them loose on the world to work their contacts and get Australia the vaccine it needs pronto. Maybe they will compete with each other or maybe they will buddy up. Either way, you know they will want to prove their worth. Great. Egos are unimportant at this stage.

All that matters for Australia more than almost anywhere else in the world is to get the vaccine into arms yesterday. The only way to justify the elimination strategy is to ensure you come out of it as quickly as possible. With little natural immunity, the population is a sitting duck.

The government’s lack of urgency on the vaccine front has been incomprehensible. What possessed Morrison to say “it’s not a race” to get the vaccine?

It absolutely was a race, a dog-eat-dog rush for a scarce good. Every country was out for itself last year.

Illustration: Terry Pontikos

The US secured 100 million Pfizer doses last July, the UK 30 million, Japan 120 million and Canada secured 20 million doses in August, Bloomberg reports, followed by Qatar, Dubai, Saudi Arabia and Oman. The EU placed an order for 300 million in September, though “dragged its feet” which led to later supply problems.

But Israel beat everyone to the punch, securing its supply last June because then President Benjamin Netanyahu was willing to pay top dollar and “obsessively” phoned Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla. “He called me 30 times,” said Bourla. The persistence paid off. Israel boasts the world’s fastest vaccination program and had already vaccinated one quarter of its population in January, a month before Australia delivered its first jab.

Why wasn’t Morrison on the phone to Bourla 30 times?

It took until last November for Australia to order its first 10 million Pfizer doses, putting it at the back of the queue and at the mercy of supply hiccups.

Now we are told one million doses will arrive each week from July 19. Great. But other countries are already stocking up for potential booster shots. Canada has just bought another 125 million doses to have on standby the next two years. Frankly, it’s outrageous that Australia, which has fought alongside America in every war, is being hung out to dry by its great ally which has Covid vaccines to burn, thanks to Operation Warp Speed.

The Biden administration has given away 80 million Covid vaccine doses to other countries already and boasts every week about the tens of millions of doses it’s rolling out to Latin America and countries around the globe.

Why isn’t Australia on that list? Has anyone asked?

The fact is, Morrison and Health Minister Greg Hunt, in their diffidence, have comprehensively stuffed the vaccine procurement process — and you don’t have to believe Rudd’s self-aggrandising to know that. The people locked up in an apartment block in Bondi Junction knew it when they posted a plaintive sign in their window asking “where is the vaccine?”.

Liz Nable, the owner of a northern beaches fitness studio forced to close, knew it when she told The Daily Telegraph last week “This is not our fault. The government has stuffed up the vaccine rollout which obviously exacerbated this lockdown situation and the only aspect of the economy that’s really getting hammered is small business.”

Then the government compounded the insult by running a fearmongering ad to combat supposed “vaccine hesitancy” when you can’t even book a vaccine shot if you’re under 40.

What is the point of running an ad showing a young woman in a hospital bed struggling to breathe when people in her age group are at low risk of hospitalisation or death? The ad will backfire because it is untruthful. The only people in NSW who have died with Covid this year are a woman in her 90s and a man in his 70s, and that is to be expected since it is older people mostly at risk.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control, the mortality risk for someone aged over 85 is 610 times higher than it is for 18–29-year-olds, the age group of the struggling girl in the ad.

It’s 230 times greater for a 75–84-year-old, 95 times greater for a 65–74-year-old, 35 times greater for a 50-64-year-old, 10 times greater for a 40-49-year-old and four times greater for a 30-39-year-old. In other words, the risk curve is exponential. The risk of death doubles roughly every five years.

And for young children the risk is minuscule to non-existent. The infection fatality rate for children aged five to nine is 0.001 per cent, far less than for the flu (0.1 per cent), according to a November research paper in Nature Magazine based on Covid deaths in 45 countries. In other words, the person in the ad should have been a senior citizen.

The ad is deceptive in another way, too, because the risk of death is “significantly higher” for men than for women, according to Nature.

For those aged over 80, the fatality rate for men (10.83 per cent) is almost double that of women (5.76 per cent).

The age correlation is the most distinctive aspect if the disease, and it’s also a gift. Imagine how much more tragic the pandemic would have been if young people were most at risk of dying, as was the case with the Spanish flu.

Running ads is pointless, anyway, with inadequate supplies of vaccine.

Morrison has a choice. He can win the next election as a world-class Covid manager or lose miserably as a historic incompetent.

The difference will be whether he mounts an Australian-style Operation Warp Speed on vaccine procurement – not doses dribbling in at an opaque rate.

Get Rudd and Turnbull on the job. Put their money where their mouth is.

Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph