Lost months exact high human and financial cost

What a fine situation Australia finds itself in. The two biggest states are living in lockdown because a handful of people atop the Morrison and Berejiklian governments have made a series of bad calls.

The lockdowns, which look like lasting in various forms for at least the rest of the year, are estimated by economists to be costing the nation well over $1 billion a week.

Melbourne’s CBD in lockdown.Credit: Justin McManus

We are back to a daily death toll. Delta is now named as the culprit but in truth that is just the name of the variant of the coronavirus that took more than 900 Australian lives last year. That is what viruses like this one do: they mutate.

Why are we in such a bad place? Partly because the NSW government thought – and appears to still think – that it was special and refused to accept that luck might have played a role in determining its previous experiences in this pandemic.

But a larger cause is the Morrison government’s inexplicable inability to secure a timely, sizeable portfolio of vaccines last year. There is a very high chance that the misery and uncertainty we’re experiencing now, with the NSW outbreak regularly bleeding into Victoria, would not be happening if things had gone differently.

It is a policy failure, and the federal government’s explanation of how it came about, is either unconvincing or disturbing, depending on how you look at it.

On an appearance on ABC TV last Sunday, the health minister Greg Hunt owned up to what could be termed as vaccine hesitancy on the part of the government.

Asked by Insiders host David Speers if there would be fewer infections now if Australia had signed a deal with Pfizer in July and August last year when the US, Canada, the UK and Japan were doing deals, Hunt offered a flat denial.

“There was no other deal available,” he said. “We’re happy to receive any criticism for the things that we control, but that notion of there being another deal available has been completely and comprehensively debunked.”

According to Hunt, Australia “knew that the international supply would be focused initially on Europe and America, where there was mass death”, and this was why it concentrated its efforts on manufacturing the AstraZeneca vaccine in Melbourne.

The official line is that federal health department officials held a series of meetings with Pfizer from mid-July last year, interspersed with phone calls, but got nowhere.

Eventually in November, long after the countries with which we compare ourselves had done their deals, an agreement was reached for an initial consignment of 10 million doses of Pfizer – an almost token amount.

Hunt says that’s all the company was able to sell Australia at the time and our overall supply of Pfizer has subsequently been boosted considerably this year.

In the midst of a global pandemic, was it really left up to bureaucrats to do the negotiations? If so, when it became clear the talks would not be fruitful, why didn’t the ministers for health, industry or trade take over? Or, better yet, the Prime Minister?

Health Minister Greg Hunt.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Did the Australian government really just accept the rebuff, throw its hands in the air and say “fair enough”? If it did, that’s alarming.

While this was happening, Victoria was embarking on an excruciatingly long lockdown in a desperate bid to stamp out the COVID outbreak that ultimately took more than 800 lives.

Clearly, the situation was dire. If Pfizer, off its own bat, told Australia to nick off and go to the end of the queue, that would be unusual behaviour for a big international pharmaceutical company.

Companies such as Pfizer like Australia. Their senior executives sent out here from head offices overseas tend to like living and doing business here – many go native after a while – and a big part of their job is to pursue good relations with Australian governments, from whom they regularly seek favourable treatment.

Some reporting suggests talks with Pfizer got off to a bad start.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Some reporting suggests that an aggressive bureaucrat got the first July 2020 talks off to a bad start. If so, was that all it took or was it someone higher up the government food chain who did some damage?

Whatever did happen in the four months between the start of negotiations and the November agreement, neither the government nor the company wants to give a blow-by-blow account. After all, they’re in a client-provider relationship and want to put it behind them.

Those lost months are today exacting a great human and financial cost. If the rah-rah messages in the past week or so suggesting that the vaccine rollout is finally up and running at speed are based on truth, that will be a great thing, but it is all a bit late, to say the least.

It’s tempting to speculate on what the overarching political narrative would be now if a federal Labor government had failed to vaccinate Australians promptly, thus leaving them exposed to a far-reaching new outbreak triggered by the poor choices and intransigence of a state Labor government that it had consistently touted as the world’s best in handling the pandemic.

You can only imagine the things business and large segments of the media would be saying.

Shaun Carney is a regular columnist.