Scott Morrison’s slow COVID vaccine rollout bigger issue than Brittany Higgins
The real threat to Scott Morrison is a vaccine program that keeps falling behind and leading to more uncertainty, chaos and snap lockdowns, writes James Morrow.
Opinion
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Anyone who thinks Australia’s stern-faced chief health officers don’t have a sense of humour have never had a good listen to Queensland’s own Dr Jeannette Young.
On March 19, Dr Young stood up before the cameras and delivered what would turn out to be one of the greatest howlers to hit the airwaves since Hey Hey It’s Saturday got the axe.
“There’s no need to go into lockdown when we’ve got responses like this,” she said, speaking about a focused lockdown of local hospitals and aged-care homes that presumably saved the state from greater catastrophe.
“We’ve handled it beautifully, absolutely beautifully.”
Dr Young’s comments, of course, aged like fine milk.
On Monday, Annastacia Palaszczuk brought the hammer down on Brisbane over a handful of cases and for good measure instituted a statewide mask mandate to prevent any sudden outbreaks in Cairns or Cloncurry, 1700km away from the capital.
Now there’s no need to dive too deeply into the impact of this here-we-go-again Groundhog Day lockdown. We have, sadly, been here before.
Queensland’s tourism sector was expecting an Easter resurrection of its own; now countless interstate holiday makers ready to take off for the school break are on a knife edge.
Brisbane’s latest lockdown will likely represent a $2bn hit to the economy, made symbolically worse by the fact it came down, surely just by coincidence, the day after the federal government’s JobKeeper program ended.
But while it is easy, and not wrong, to fault the Palaszczuk-Young government for this mayhem (the Premier always defers to health advice, like a king consulting his astrologer), the Morrison government with its glacial vaccine rollout must also own a large share of the blame.
And that, far more than the past five weeks of stories about Brittany Higgins or Christian Porter or depraved parliamentary staffers, spells trouble for the Prime Minister.
From the start of the pandemic, Scott Morrison has been very clear that the way out of the pandemic was through a vaccine, leading to an end to restrictions, an opening of borders, and a return to normal.
On April 3 of last year he was very explicit on the subject: “A vaccine ultimately enables everybody to go back to life as it was.”
Well, promises, promises.
Because while the world now has several really effective vaccines, Australia is administering its allocations at a snail’s pace.
Even with a full year to come up with some sort of scheme to distribute vaccines, those who are eligible for the jab at this stage are, as The Daily Telegraph reports today, facing delays, confusion and run-arounds.
Meanwhile, states and the feds are playing an unedifying game of tit-for-tat over why only around 2 per cent of the population has received the jab.
Although Health Department secretary Brendan Murphy is at pains to tell us that “this is not a race” and that there is no medical urgency to the rollout in Australia, that is cold comfort to a cafe owner forced to throw out thousands of dollars in produce because of a snap lockdown or a family whose upcoming holiday might be wrecked.
Nor does it do anything for the economy, which has been largely supported by massive stimulus programs such as the recent $1.2bn bone thrown towards tourism, and whose ultimate recovery requires a speedy and permanent reopening of borders.
About 541,000 Australians have received one or both of their vaccine doses, which suggests Australia is 1.1 million jabs short of where we were supposed to be even on revised targets, and 3.5 million jabs short of the government’s original goal of four million doses given by the end of March.
That means that in order for 15 million to 20 million Australians to be vaccinated by the end of October — when Greg Hunt promised that every adult who wanted the vaccine would be able to get one — more than a million jabs will have to be administered per week.
Starting tomorrow.
All the more shocking when you consider the rest of the world.
Of course Australia isn’t Israel, Indonesia, Albania, or Azerbaijan — all nations that are beating us in the vaccine race.
But it is worth noting that the US, an infinitely more complex and divided nation where 50 states are rushing to jab a population of 332 million, had vaccinated more than 16 million people by the time Joe Biden was inaugurated, and has now administered about 143 million jabs.
There they are now rolling out millions of jabs each day via vaccination centres and local chemists across the country (my father is about to get his second Pfizer jab at a clinic in Albany, New York).
Yet in Australia, where we have had a year to put something in place, the federal Health Department hasn’t even announced which community pharmacies will be allowed to participate, having closed their expressions of interest process on February 19.
That means an Australia condemned to a state of quasi-normalcy and quasi-crisis for a long time to come, and a Morrison government pressured to hand out ever more money to keep the economy (and its poll numbers) ticking over.
Scott Morrison took a hit in the opinion polls over his handling of Brittany Higgins, Christian Porter, and filthy parliamentary staffers, but so far his opposite Anthony Albanese has been unable to capitalise.
That could change as Australians see true normalcy denied them even as the rest of the world moves on.
Read related topics:COVID-19 Vaccine
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