Monday morning quarterbacks as far as the eyes can see. That’s what you find when trolling through social media to see what people are thinking when it comes to the vaccine rollout. Everyone is wise after the fact. All those who care but aren’t responsible.
Experts in their own lunch boxes who would have done things differently to how the government managed the rollout, and indeed the choice of vaccines and the prioritisation around when to start giving Australians the jab. It would be funny if it wasn’t so serious.
Pile-ons are of course the abiding consistency we see on social media, as people rush to judgment airing their views, often before turning on their brains. The rapid fire nature of the medium lends itself to such knee jerk reactions. Politicians fall victim to it, so do commentators, and so does the general public. We all do to varying extents. Or at least those of us addicted to the platforms on offer.
Egg on faces
To be sure, the rollout of the vaccine has been more of a stroll out, and things certainly could have been done differently and done better. The messaging in particular has been poor.
The premature gloating that we are at the front of the vaccine queue was stupid and has left the health minister and others with egg all over their faces.
Of course most knee jerk readers of headlines and not details won’t even make it to this important caveat. They will pile on and attack the premise without going any further. A micro example of the macro problem of a mob mentality.
If we can put our wisdom with hindsight to one side just for a minute and step through what’s actually happened, it’s easy to see how we got to where we are now. And it’s not all-out incompetence to blame, even if there has been some of that along the way.
The federal government invested the lion’s share of its vaccine strategy in the University of Queensland vaccine (buy Australian made) and the Oxford University AstraZeneca one. The former decision was necessary in the name of nationalism — just imagine if the Morrison government had rejected the Aussie made version? Critics would have been scathing. Unfortunately it had to be junked late in the process.
The Oxford vaccine was and remains world leading — because of its ease of transport and storage it will be the saviour of the developing world. It also was able to be made locally while MRNA versions are not, so it made sense to invest heavily in it for that reason alone.
As it turns out one in a million people injected with AstraZeneca will die from blood clotting. A low risk to be sure, but risk adverse administrators have made this a bigger issue than it should have been. Helped along by confusing messaging and political interference, not to mention media sensationalism.
Putting eggs in two vaccine baskets made sense
The point is that putting most of our eggs in these two vaccine baskets made sense. Unfortunately the UQ vaccine fell over during clinical trials and AstraZeneca is prone to fear mongering.
We did still invest in Pfizer, but not to the degree necessary to instantly cover our needs if both of the above ran into complications, which they ultimately did.
Little of the above could have been planned for, although in fairness the opposition was an early adopter to the need to invest in more redundancy options for vaccine safety. Then shadow health spokesman Chris Bowen banged on about the need to do that for weeks, largely ignored at the time. Including within his own party frankly.
Now the Monday morning quarterbacks have joined in. At least Bowen was on point well before the game started.
The other factor often forgotten is that Australia only began rolling out vaccinations after more lengthy approval processes than in countries ravaged by Covid. They took the risk to start injecting untested product into peoples arms early. We didn’t have to do that because we had managed the pandemic much better. That should be applauded not condemned.
Victim of our own success
In other words the slower vaccine rollout is an example of Australia being a victim of its own success. To some extent anyway.
So to the critics out there, by all means hold the government to account for failures along the way. There certainly have been a few. Nothing wrong with that. But the wisdom of hindsight overused is unbecoming, even if it’s easy click bait.
Peter van Onselen is a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Western Australia and Griffith University
