Peta Credlin: Shame on the states for not helping NSW out with Pfizer jabs

Other states should hang their heads in shame for rejecting Premier Gladys Berejiklian’s plea for extra Pfizer doses for NSW, Peta Credlin writes.

National cabinet made a potentially disastrous error this week by refusing to provide NSW with more Pfizer jabs to get vaccination rates up in south western Sydney.

This is the epicentre of the Covid outbreak that threatens to outrun even the crack tracing teams in NSW, despite just about the toughest local lockdown anywhere yet.

Around the country, more than 75 per cent of people over 70 have had at least one jab, but in the affected parts of Sydney, that rate is less than 50 per cent.

Local medicos report huge resistance to the AZ jab, even though this is the age group where Covid is deadly and far exceeds any rare blood clot risk.

If vaccinations are to protect the most vulnerable, we must give the vulnerable whatever vaccine they will accept. If that’s Pfizer, so be it.

The added benefit of Pfizer is that people are fully vaccinated in three weeks rather than three months with AZ.

It’s muddle-headed to me to approve the vaccination of young people with Pfizer (as happened last week) when any Pfizer in Australia right now should be directed to those most at risk of death. Give older Australians their choice of vaccine and watch the vaccination rates climb.

Shame on the other states for rejecting Premier Berejiklian’s plea for extra Pfizer doses. It was only a few weeks back (in lockdown #4) that Victoria got extra help – not to mention NSW contract tracers last year and the army – but now shuns NSW and is even demanding Berejiklian encase our largest city in a “ring of steel”.

Is this really what we have allowed Covid to reduce us to? And here I was thinking we were still one country.

Watch Peta Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm