Susie O’Brien: Scott Morrison asleep at the wheel when it comes to bungled Covid rollout

ScoMo should stop rubbing noses in New Zealand and focus on fixing his slow vaccine rollout by making the vulnerable the utmost priority.

Unvaccinated aged-care residents are sitting ducks waiting for the deadly coronavirus to spread to their centres.

Most of them are terrified because they know they are vulnerable to the more virulent Indian strain. What’s the Prime Minister doing about it?

Seemingly nothing. He’s too busy rubbing noses with New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern over the ditch to care about it. Come home, Mr Morrison, and do your job keeping Australians safe.

Nothing is more important right now than getting every single aged care worker and resident vaccinated. Doesn’t he remember those dark days when 655 aged care residents in Victoria died lonely, sad deaths without their loved ones by their side?

Nearly six months ago, we were told aged-care residents and workers would be a priority in Australia’s vaccine rollout.

Officials told us it would take six weeks to administer 1.4 million doses to residents, frontline staff and other priority groups. It would be done by February, they said.

Arcare Maidstone Aged Care is managing a Covid outbreak. Picture: David Crosling

It is now June and 97 per cent of aged-care residents only received one dose three weeks ago, which won’t protect them from getting the virus.

As we have now found out, residents in 30 aged-care homes hadn’t received a vaccine at all.

Apparently, they were scheduling vaccinations around flu shots — advice that’s hurriedly been changed in light of the recent outbreak in Victoria. It’s typical of this botched rollout.

Vaccinations are being brought forward at places like Arcare Maidstone, where one third of staff and only 53 of 76 residents have been vaccinated.

The figures are better at public aged-care homes run by the state, where vaccination rates were 80 to 95 per cent back in April.

Federal ministers blame vaccine hesitancy for the slow rollout, but this isn’t good enough. Why are staff who refuse to be vaccinated still working at such sites?

Scott Morrison said on May 19 that there was “plenty of time to have the chat with the others who are a bit hesitant”. It reflects his inadequate handling of this pandemic from day one.

Snoozy Morrison has been asleep at the wheel most of this year. We don’t need more cosy chats from him; we need action.

Aged-care homes where one in three people with the virus died were the epicentre of Victoria’s Covid outbreak nearly a year ago. They should have been the highest priority this year, but were left behind as the rollout gathered pace elsewhere. So, are the federal ministers sweating the situation? Apologising to the public? Calling a royal commission? Resigning?

It doesn’t seem so. Aged Care Minister Richard Colbeck said he was “very comfortable” with the rollout so far.

“It needs to be done safely and progressively, which is exactly what we’ve done,” he said.

It’s simply not true. The rollout has been plagued since the beginning by misinformation, mixed messages and targets that would never be met. In the aged-care sector there are two tiers of priority — one for the private federal-run aged care homes and another for state public-run homes.

Scott Morrison has been asleep at the wheel most of this year.

It’s inadequate given that the disease doesn’t discriminate between public and private. It mirrors the rollout as a whole.

We were told our entire population would be vaccinated by the end of October, but by last week only four million doses of the vaccine were administered and only 1.3 per cent of the population fully covered. At this rate, we won’t all be vaccinated before July next year.

Completing vaccinations at the remaining aged-care centres in Victoria only became a priority once the new outbreak hit, leaving a dangerous gap in coverage.

We are also belatedly learning that staff have been working at several sites, despite clear directions not to do so.

State inadequacies are compounding the disastrous federal response. Acting Premier James Merlino is right that we’d be in a very different position if the federal government had prioritised building a quarantine centre outside the metro area for the highest-risk overseas arrivals.

But we’d also be much better off if we had statewide mandatory QR codes providing more accurate records of people’s movements.

When things go wrong, the states blame the feds, and the feds blame the states and European supply chains. At this point health websites are crashing, hotlines are imploding and there are waiting lines up to six hours long for people to get vaccinated.

As case numbers rise and exposure sights grow, we desperately need more from our politicians than bickering and blame-shifting.

At the very least it would be nice to have them in this country