Dr Anthony Fauci outlines way forward for Australia

The man behind America’s vaccine rollout has outlined the painful way forward for Australia as three states enter lockdown.

The United States is a vaccination success story. Australia, not so much.

A quick comparison reveals the US has administered at least one dose of a Covid vaccine to 70 per cent of adults while Australia has administered a first dose to less than 20 per cent of adults.

New President Joe Biden should take plenty of credit for that having pushed through vaccine hesitancy to get the country on the verge of reopening its borders to foreigners.

Dr Anthony Fauci, America’s chief medical adviser and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, says Australia can take lessons from what the US did well.

Speaking to the ABC’s 730 program on Thursday, Dr Fauci said young people must get vaccinated, including children.

“We’re doing the young, because we only have about 40 per cent of the young eligible vaccinated,” he said.

“I know it’s controversial. We feel you really need to get the children vaccinated. They will get infected, they will spread it inadvertently and innocently because most of them would likely not get severely ill.

“They could be asymptomatic spreaders, so we’ve got to get the kids vaccinated because this is a very, very transmissible virus.”

RELATED: Vaccine passports are dividing Australia

This time last year, the US had the highest number of cases in the world. A year on, 70 per cent of adults have received at least one dose of the COVID vaccine, and the death toll has plummeted. Dr Anthony Fauci discusses the key to America’s success. #abc730pic.twitter.com/nguqbePPqs

— abc730 (@abc730) August 5, 2021

Dr Lesley Russell is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Menzies Centre for Health Policy at the University of Sydney.

She has been a senior health policy adviser to the US Surgeon-General during the Obama administration and adviser to the Australian Labor Party.

Speaking to news.com.au, she said Prime Minister Scott Morrison should watch closely what Mr Biden has managed to achieve.

“Look at how Joe Biden is driving vaccines forward in a nation that is much more vaccine hesitant than Australia,” Dr Russell said.

“The contrast between the urgency that Joe Biden sees around vaccination, admittedly driven by 400 deaths a day, with the complacency in Australia (where the thinking has been that) we don’t need to worry because we don’t have any virus here.”

She said the first thing Australia needs to do is “improve communication with the public” in a manner that should be “much more straightforward, much more informative and much more transparent”.

“They need to have informative awareness campaigns that relate to all Australians, not just those white guys in white coats talking to white Australians.

“We’re a multicultural country with people of all sorts of levels of health literacy.”

She says Australia has “really failed when it comes to vaccinations” and the Morrison Government has “not shown the necessary flexibility or adaptability to change” when things went wrong.

The United States, which closed its borders to much of the world as the pandemic took hold, plans eventually to begin allowing fully vaccinated foreigners back in, a White House official said Wednesday.

President Biden’s administration, recognising the importance of international travel, wants to reopen to visitors from abroad in a “safe and sustainable manner,” the official said.

It is developing “a phased approach that over time will mean, with limited exceptions, that foreign nationals travelling to the United States — from all countries need to be fully vaccinated,” the official added, without specifying a timeframe.

— with AFP