Politicians got a fair bit right on Covid-19 as journalists split on party lines

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has largely ignored his critics on vaccination and quarantine to preserve the unity of national cabinet. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Gary Ramage

For all the media criticism of politicians’ handling of Covid-19, history may judge our leaders to have performed better than journalists and medical regulators.

Media sensationalism played a big role in hyping a one-in-a-million risk of death from rare blood clots associated with Australia’s preferred AstraZeneca vaccine. Coverage was so overblown many people in Sydney are still waiting for Pfizer jabs, rather than take the readily available Astra. Yet ABC health editor Norman Swan, an early critic of Astra, now says it may be more effective than Pfizer against the Delta variant of Covid.

Our medical regulators also harmed the vaccine rollout. The Therapeutic Goods Administration’s first approval came six weeks after US approval. Then the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation stoked vaccine hesitancy by first “preferring” Astra for over 50s, and then for over 60s. This left Australia with globally low vaccination rates in June at the start of the present Sydney outbreak.

Hindsight is easy but Astra was the logical choice for Australia a year ago. Labor would probably have made the same choice. Astra could be stored at normal refrigeration temperatures, was easier to handle and distribute and could be made in Australia.

As this column argued three months ago, Prime Minister Scott Morrison had little choice, with almost no Covid at the time, but to cave in to ATAGI’s “medical advice”, given the ABC and others would have blamed him personally for every Astra blood clot death. Morrison did eventually find his mettle in June when Delta hit Sydney, and on cue he was bagged by the ABC and Guardian for urging young people to see their doctor about an Astra jab.

Media coverage of virus escapes from quarantine has been just as flawed. Journalists should know hotel quarantine was agreed to by national cabinet. Victorian Premier Dan Andrews even claimed it was his idea. The premiers understandably wanted the money from quarantine to support CBD hotels that were struggling with low occupancy rates after the international border closure.

Morrison has largely ignored his critics on vaccination and quarantine to preserve the unity of national cabinet. This leaves him looking flat-footed as Labor premiers backflip on deals they have already agreed to. Few reporters call the premiers out. For example, journalists who could not give Labor state and federal politicians enough space to demand faster quarantine returns of Australians stuck overseas never questioned the premiers mid-year when they demanded dramatic reductions in overseas arrivals.

The truth is politicians did not know what they did not know at the start of the pandemic. Yet they got a fair bit right. From the decision to stop flights between Australia and China to the closing of our international borders and the introduction of JobKeeper, our leaders did a better job than most overseas governments. They got half a million Australians home and finished 2020 with among the world’s lowest Covid death rates – 910 dead from a population of 25 million – and the second best performing economy in the OECD.

The media did less well last year. Journalists jumped all over the Berejiklian government’s mishandling of the Ruby Princess in April 2020. Partisan reporters tried to pin it on then Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton. An inquiry by the nation’s sharpest Queen’s Counsel, Bret Walker, pinned most of the blame on state health officials.

Natcab

The media again split along partisan lines over the 112-day lockdown by Victorian Premier Dan Andrews, who held his own Commission of Inquiry that ended in the resignation of the head of his department and claims no one knew who decided on private security firms to run the state’s hotel quarantine.

The media Right went nuts, and still is on Andrews. The media Left fell in behind the “I Stand With Dan” hashtag on Twitter. Journalists who asked Andrews tough questions were targeted personally on social media. No journalist should “stand with” any politician, until they leave the business for PR.

Many journalists who defended every step Andrews made last year have criticised every Berejiklian step this year. They don’t mention Victoria’s much higher death rate. Nor do they admit reporters from this newspaper and Sky News have been just as tough on Berejiklian as Andrews.

By the middle of last week even the most provincial media defenders of the Labor premiers prepared to abandon their own national cabinet commitments in the name of Covid-zero must have been starting to see the light. Andrews on Wednesday admitted Victoria’s hard lockdown would not achieve zero Covid.

He was accepting what Berejiklian had said for more than a month – only rapidly increasing vaccination would pare back the Delta virus. WA and Queensland Labor leaders Mark McGowan and Annastacia Palaszczuk will eventually reach the same conclusion. Journalists who can’t see the obvious just need to look at New Zealand’s latest outbreak.

Palaszczuk and her chief health officer disgraced themselves mid-year with false claims about AstraZeneca. They did so again last week when they allowed the families of NRL players across the state’s border even as they refused entry to a three-year-old who had been holidaying with his grandparents in NSW. As politics, it put Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen to shame. Palaszczuk’s fearmongering on Doherty Report modelling in state parliament last week rivalled Craig Kelly for misinformation.

Worse have been the senior ABC women feeding into false claims about vaccination for children. Palaszczuk falsely implied Coalition governments were risking child safety when she knows young children are not approved for vaccination anywhere in the world. While they can catch Covid, it seldom makes them sick.

Neither has a timid, politically correct media been intelligent enough to look seriously at the cultural factors in Aboriginal Australia and in outer suburban Sydney and Melbourne multicultural communities that feed vaccine hesitancy and rapid case spread.

My Aboriginal contacts have been predicting a Covid disaster in outback communities all year. Cultural, family and lifestyle issues, more than poverty, racism or language, have assured the most vaccine-hesitant communities in Aboriginal and multicultural communities are also the ones with the highest smoking rates, the worst general health, the highest density per household and the highest rate of multi-generational families.

That sort of reporting is difficult. It’s much easier to lead bulletins with sensational claims of soaring case numbers, out-of-control virus spread and a failing hospital system, even though this is not what is happening.

Sydney’s hospital system is coping well. Lockdowns in Sydney and Melbourne have slowed the spread. Virus reproduction numbers are falling and in Sydney, it’s only just above 1. Case numbers in Sydney and Melbourne will continue to rise, but the curve will bend as vaccinations rates rise.

More interesting will be watching how the health systems cope in WA and Queensland when Delta inevitably hits the way it did in New Zealand.