Rita Panahi: ‘Gold standard’ Gladys Berejiklian’s dramatic fall from grace

The NSW premier’s claims the Delta variant is a “game-changer” has not been the experience of countries reopening without being close to the vaccination thresholds Australia aims for.

Gladys Berejiklian’s fall from grace has seen her go from the “gold standard” to Premier of locked down “Gladystan”, lecturing her constituents about the ills of “browsing”.

So much for a proportional, rational response to coronavirus. “Browsing is not allowed,” scolded Berejiklian. She was echoing the sentiments of chief health officer Dr Kerry Chant who said: “This is not the time for browsing.”

Like Victoria, the police in NSW have enthusiastically overstepped the mark, with assistant commissioner Tony Cooke warning the citizenry that officers will carefully scrutinise their shopping to ensure they have left home for an essential reason.

“The question will be … what’s your reasonable excuse for being here? You don’t need that pair of shoes today,” he said.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has lectured people about the ills of “browsing”.

For more than 15 months Berejiklian was the sensible antidote to the hysterical bed-wetting from every other state leader, Labor and Liberal, but sadly she is now pursuing an eradication model that could see Sydney and surrounds locked down for many more weeks.

NSW reported 89 news cases on Tuesday, but 59 of these are household contacts. Surely, if we’re going to continue to be hysterical about each single case, then it would be prudent to send infected individuals to hotel quarantine (at the state’s expense) instead of home to infect the household.

Berejiklian claims the Delta variant is a “game changer”, but that has not been the experience in other advanced nations that have reopened or are reopening and doing so without reaching anything close to the vaccination thresholds being considered in Australia.

On Tuesday Premier Dan Andrews said even a vaccination rate of 75 per cent wouldn’t be sufficient to return to normality given that would leave millions unvaccinated.

“It’s a pretty big number of people, and if it runs through there – and a percentage of them get really unwell – then that’s the hospitals full,” he said.

Gladys Berejiklian is now pursuing an eradication model that could see Sydney and surrounds locked down for many more weeks. Picture: Jenny Evans/Getty Images

Only that has not been the case in the advanced world. One look at Florida which has been open all year would dispel fears of hospitals unable to cope. Florida is known as “God’s little waiting room” for having the second oldest population in the US but despite being fully open for months the hospital system has not been overwhelmed nor has the death rate soared.

Even the states that locked down the longest and hardest, such as New York and California, have reopened. Indeed 48 US states are open for business despite less than 50 per cent of the country being fully vaccinated. The UK will lift remaining restrictions such as masks, social distancing, legal limits on gatherings on July 19 with 65 per cent of its adult population (around 52 per cent of total population) fully vaccinated, despite new daily cases of more than 30,000.

The surge in Delta variant infections is not reflected in a similar surge in hospital admissions and deaths thanks largely to the high vaccination rate of those at greatest risk of Covid-19.

And there is more good news from the UK, with the most comprehensive study of children with Covid concluding that the risk of serious illness or death is extremely low, far lower than influenza, with a survival rate of 99.995 per cent.

Australia is suffering from a failure of leadership, at both state and federal level, with our elected representatives relinquishing their power to unelected, unaccountable health bureaucrats.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s claim that the vaccine rollout is “not a race” has held Australia back. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Christian Gilles

Scott Morrison was listening to the “best health advice” when he began Australia’s vaccine program later than much of the world and he was dutifully echoing Brendan Murphy when he repeated the health department secretary’s line about the rollout not being a race. As I wrote back in March, the “it’s not a race” mentality was holding Australia back and was the product of a gutless political class and health bureaucrats who have a narrow focus of what constitutes success.

It is imperative the Prime Minister does not handball the most crucial decision about reopening the country to the health bureaucracy or the Doherty Institute, whose modelling has, at times, been wildly wrong including the prediction that under a best-case scenario, with strict isolation and social distancing, we’d need 5000 intensive care beds for Covid cases.

The Doherty Institute will provide recommendations to the PM and state and territory leaders on vaccine thresholds to be met for the four-phase reopening of the country. It would be politically expedient, though ruinous for the country, to set a benchmark of 80 per cent or more.

Targets for lifting Covid restrictions and fully reopening should be based on vaccine availability rather than the actual percentage of people immunised.

By now everyone who is in a high-risk category should be vaccinated, they’ve had since February to get their jabs. We cannot keep Australia isolated to “protect” people unwilling to be immunised.