Andrew Bolt: The Morrison government bet on the wrong vaccine

How many more must die in a vaccination program to protect us from a virus that’s not actually killing Australians?

The Morrison government bet on the wrong vaccine. It should now admit its AstraZeneca shot is deadlier to most Australians than the coronavirus.

It ordered nearly 54 million doses of AstraZeneca, but it makes no sense now for most of us to take it.

The maths is simple. The Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation reckons at least one in a million people injected with AstraZeneca will die from blood clots. Data from Germany and Scandinavia suggest the real risk could be twice that.

This means at least 25 of us would die if every Australian gets this vaccine. Maybe even 50.

That’s at least 25 who’d die from a vaccine against a virus that has killed only one Australian in six months — an 80-year-old who got infected in the Philippines.

In fact, AstraZeneca has apparently matched that virus toll already. Last week an Australian woman, just 48, died from what the Therapeutic Goods Administration says was “likely” her AstraZeneca injection.

How many more must die in a vaccination program to protect us from a virus that’s not actually killing Australians?

That cost for that benefit makes no sense. Not for most of us. Not while our border controls and contact tracers are keeping outbreaks under control.

Astra-Zeneca vaccine is not advised for those under 50.

The odds look even crazier for younger Australians. The coronavirus has killed almost no Australians younger than 50, yet the young are at most risk from getting fatal blood clots from the AstraZeneca jab. The two Australians who’ve already developed blood clots were both in their 40s.

Yes, we are talking about very tiny risks with this vaccine. But this is a country that shuts down whole cities when just one person gets sick. And the maths is against AstraZeneca.

In fact, there’s even more sense in giving AstraZeneca a miss when other vaccines aren’t associated with blood clotting, provided we’re happy to wait another six months or more for them.

Indeed, the government has now quickly ordered 20 million more doses of the Pfizer vaccine, on top of the 20 million it ordered last year.

That sounds like a solution, even allowing for every vaccination requiring two shots. But we’ve learned already that it’s one thing to order vaccines from overseas, and another to get them.

We’ve so far received just a million doses of our first Pfizer order, and are told we must wait until the last three months of this year to get the second order.

For many Australians, that wait will be worth it. I’m betting they’d rather get the safer Pfizer vaccine at Christmas than AstraZeneca now. Indeed, the government already says most Australians under 50 should get only the Pfizer vaccine.

It’s not in my interests to say this. I have two children overseas who want to come home, and the sooner we’re all vaccinated the faster we can loosen our border restrictions.

Indeed, you could even say it’s in our national interest to keep injecting as many Australians as possible with AstraZeneca. It would help us to open our economy, and a one-in-a-million risk of death from the vaccine is actually tiny — smaller than the risk we take driving home late on a Friday.

But who gets an injection in the national interest?

Of course, for some Australians the AstraZeneca vaccine is still a great bet. They’d include everyone working with coronavirus patients, or planning to travel overseas.

The Morrison government must admit it bet on the wrong vaccine.

Travel changes the balance of risks dramatically. Oxford University has built a virus risk-calculator which tells me I have a one in 4478 chance of dying from the coronavirus if I spend half a year in Britain. That makes AstraZeneca seem a safer option.

But who’s likely to travel anywhere this year? Even if we all take AstraZeneca, the borders will stay closed. As Health Minister Greg Hunt 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.”

Sure, we may get lucky and find the blood clotting had nothing to do with AstraZeneca, after all.

Or we may get desperately unlucky, and suffer a new wave of infections that makes us pay for not getting an AstraZeneca shot when we could.

But I figure many Australians will decide there’s no harm for now to sit tight and give AstraZeneca a miss.

The Morrison government should admit, statistically, they’re not wrong. Why push this vaccine now, when safer ones are around the corner?