Sarah Blake: Covid vaccine snobbery is holding Australia back

The Covid-19 vaccine rollout is a disaster but Australians have to step up to do their part if we’re going to win this war, writes Sarah Blake.

We lost count of Americans who asked over the past four years what possible reason we had for choosing to live there instead of Australia.

Long before Australia had one of the world’s most successful early Covid-19 responses, fast talking New Yorkers were regularly stumped we had traded in our beautiful country for their chaotic city.

But as we wrapped up our life in the US over the past few months the tone changed and more than one person asked what was going so wrong Down Under.

We gave them the easy explanation, that our headline making shutdowns were due to a shambolic vaccine rollout.

And yes, there is no doubt our federal government has completely stuffed up securing an adequate supply.

Sarah Blake has returned to Australia after living in New York, where she contracted Covid-19. Picture: Dylan Robinson

But what I’ve learned from inside hotel quarantine this past week has been a shock.

A glaring range of Australians still don’t get it.

Possibly the biggest thing holding us back is vaccine snobbery and there are many who should hang their heads in shame for promoting it.

We received the one-shot Johnson and Johnson jab in March and became unwell with Covid-19 within three days. It was bad timing and we felt we’d picked up the virus in the huge vaccination hub we attended in the Bronx.

Despite this we had our sons immunised with the same drug in late April after they recovered from Covid.

I booked their shots on the morning they became eligible, taking the first available slot rather than waiting several weeks longer to maybe snag a Pfizer or Moderna dose.

Even though we all had antibodies from our recent recovery we didn’t want to wait for the four of us to be fully vaccinated. I knew this would be our choice back in January when I had a visceral punch of envy seeing people in a vaccination queue at a Washington DC supermarket.

This was the only path to recovery and I didn’t want to wait a moment past my turn for access to a medical miracle.

Maybe it’s because Australians didn’t experience what so many around the world did in the first waves.

The constant scream of ambulances, the deaths and disabling illnesses of people we knew. No in-person schooling of my sons for more than a year. Months of real fear of a virus that was just outside our door. So many bodies that morgues couldn’t keep up.

When we got home last week and told people which vaccine we had, the response ranged from a teenager saying “eeww” to a sniffy assurance that we will need some kind of booster.

It’s the same dismissive and doubtful attitude many have to the AstraZeneca jab.

But it has been used across the world, is more effective than the annual flu shot and less likely to cause blood clots than the contraceptive pill.

We have been let down from the very top in terms of vaccine supply but that’s no excuse for a lack of agency.

Too many Australians seem to be under the illusion that they can wait a few months for a Pfizer shot or that Covid-19 is just a bad flu.

I can tell you this is nonsense. I still haven’t regained my full sense of taste or my fitness and now get heart palpitations.

There is no excuse for anyone eligible to put off any jab they can get. Complacency is threatening our recovery and it’s past time the Lucky Country woke up to itself.