Rita Panahi: We can’t all afford to wait and see on vaccine

Victorians stranded across the border should be given every assistance to return instead of treated like disease-riddled criminals.

The taxpayer-funded public health officials who are, for all intents and purposes, running the country appear in no hurry to roll out the COVID-19 vaccine.

Safe in their jobs and with their salaries intact, they feel there is no urgency in having the country inoculated against a virus that has disrupted and destroyed so many lives.

Right now we have Victorians separated from their families and unable to return to their own homes because of ludicrous rules imposed at the behest of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats.

Where is the science behind the determination that Victorians who have only been in green zones in NSW, areas that have not seen a single case of coronavirus in months, pose an unacceptable risk to the community?

Why do Victorian authorities have so little faith in the state’s contact tracing capabilities this deep into the pandemic?

Victoria was recording more than 100 new cases of community transmission a day when NSW closed the border. Victoria’s panic-stricken decision for a hard border closure came on a day when NSW recorded just 10 new cases.

VIctoria’s border closure caused chaos and has left many Victorians stranded.

In the five days following that decision, NSW recorded the following daily cases: three, seven, eight, zero and four.

The argument that it’s in the public interest to deny Victorians stranded in NSW entry into their own state borders on the insane.

These people have families, jobs and responsibilities and should be given every assistance instead of treated like disease-riddled criminals.

And yet in the minds of public health officials, the ongoing assault against our civil liberties and ability to earn a living is not considered worthy of fast-tracking a vaccine that is being widely distributed in other first-world nations.

More than four million doses have already been administered in the US and millions more have been vaccinated in other countries including Germany, Canada, Italy and Israel.

But though the COVID-19 vaccine has been determined safe to use elsewhere, there are increasing fears the March timeline for the rollout of the program in Australia will be delayed due to hold-ups in the approval process.

While most developed nations are fast tracking the vaccine to protect the most vulnerable members of their community and to allow their societies and economies to fully reopen, Australia is deliberately lagging behind with a wait-and-see strategy.

Australia is left in the dust as many countries begin rolling out vaccines.

On Monday Victoria’s Deputy Chief Health Officer Allen Cheng sent a series of tweets explaining the delay in distributing the vaccine in Australia.

“Ultimately, the question is whether the benefit of using the vaccine outweighs the known risks and the uncertainties,” wrote Mr Cheng, who is also chair of the Advisory Committee for Vaccines.

“Even with the current situation in NSW and VIC, we can afford to wait for the TGA (Therapeutic Goods Administration) to do its job and make sure we’re getting a safe, effective and quality vaccine.”

With all due respect to Mr Cheng, the “we can afford to wait” mindset is highly dependent on whether you have a job and income security.

The cost of the delay is not just economic, there is also a very real human cost.

Poverty is a health issue, as is depression, anxiety, suicide and increased rates of cancer and heart disease due to lack of testing and early intervention.

We have managed to suppress the virus but not without decimating our economy with entire industries on their knees and many others surviving on handouts.

The reason we have not been as affected as many other countries is due to our isolation and the fact as an island nation we can and did close our borders early in the pandemic.

But that privilege comes with extraordinary cost and both our state and federal governments, or to be more precise, the long-suffering taxpayers, are up to their eyeballs in unprecedented levels of debt.

The federal debt will hit upwards of $1.5 trillion this decade while Victoria has the highest deficit of any state government, with net debt set to soar to $155bn by 2024.

Tens of thousands of livelihoods and businesses have been destroyed, people have through no fault of their own lost what they worked years to build and children have copped the double whammy of having their schooling interrupted and saddled with mountains of debt that will take decades to pay back.

With the end of JobKeeper in March, we will begin to see the true cost of the economic fallout.

Public health officials can’t have it both ways; they can’t argue there is no urgency for the vaccine but also impose draconian measures after a small number of infections that were, in any case, being managed well by NSW authorities.

One wonders what decisions we would’ve seen from this cohort if they were surviving on JobKeeper payments rather than their full salaries.

IN SHORT

NSW managed to record zero new cases on Monday without a mask mandate and yet it has caved to pressure and will begin fining people who are not masked in certain indoor settings in some municipalities.

Rita Panahi is a Herald Sun columnist