Global criticism of vaccine rollout misses the mark

With exquisitely poor timing given the European Championship result, Britain’s normally sober Financial Times newspaper has sought to lecture Australia on the perils of squandering a lead. Joining the pile-on against the Morrison government’s vaccine rollout, the FT’s editorial board has crowed about our nation’s fall from grace in the Covid stakes because of the Sydney outbreak. With NSW recording another 112 cases overnight Sunday and a lockdown extension all but assured, the very small outbreak by world standards is nonetheless bad news for NSW. But it is a far cry from what is happening in much of the world.

The FT accurately reported that Australia had deployed an enviable test and tracing system that had helped to keep its total Covid-19 death toll at 910 (now 911). That is fewer than the number countries such as Britain have recorded in one day at times. While the FT makes some valid points about the folly of isolation as a meaningful long-term strategy for dealing with the pandemic, its editorial view on vaccines, given Australia has lived largely virus-free throughout the pandemic, is as misguided as a Marcus Rashford penalty kick.

The FT has been paying too much attention to the lopsided view of those who wish to misrepresent the facts on how Australia has fared with the vaccine, and why. Among them, no doubt, was former prime minister Kevin Rudd who was presented by the ABC as the unsung middleman in negotiations for more supplies of the Pfizer vaccine. Mr Rudd as saviour was lapped up by partisan elements in the media but shot down as rubbish by those involved. Pfizer issued a statement that there were only two parties involved in the agreement to increase supplies, Pfizer and the Australian government.

The Morrison government’s performance on vaccines has been unfortunate and has been criticised by this paper. Messaging has been poor and distractions over efficacy have been allowed to undermine the core objective. Too much reporting has obsessed over detail at the expense of the bigger picture, exacerbating vaccine hesitancy in the community. The low number of Covid cases has been allowed to skew the risk analysis in favour of caution against the bigger public benefit of quicker widespread coverage.

That said, it’s easy to be wise after the event, as the Johnson government was when it failed to lock down its borders early in the pandemic, allowing (then) unvaccinated visitors to stream in, infecting the British population. Given the choice to spend the pandemic in Australia or Britain, few people would have chosen the latter. Even now, with “Freedom Day’’ around the corner in Britain, the daily caseload of new infections exceeded 35,000 on Friday, with 29 more deaths. Two-thirds of adults are fully vaccinated, which is keeping hospitalisations down but they are rising again. Many critics, the FT included, are ready to sing the Morrison government to death on its vaccine performance. “One day a rooster, the next a feather duster,” the FT claimed. “For the leaders of the country’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, it has become regrettably apt.” But as Peter van Onselen wrote on Saturday, it is far from certain that the federal government has botched the vaccine rollout. More than 30 per cent of eligible Australians have received their first vaccine dose and just over 10 per cent are fully vaccinated in a country where Covid is virtually non-existent compared with elsewhere in the world.

The long waiting time between a first and second injection for the AstraZeneca vaccine has made Australia’s rollout look slow compared with countries using the Pfizer vaccine, which has a shorter interval between doses. In hindsight, Pfizer may have been a better option for Australia but there are many sound reasons the decision to back AstraZeneca was made. With doses of Pfizer becoming more available, there is every reason to believe rates of vaccination will rise quickly and the threat posed by the pandemic will recede. As the Melbourne and Sydney lockdowns have shown, faced with a spike, citizens are far likelier to take up the vaccines on offer.

In the meantime, dealing with the immediate impact of the Sydney lockdown on families and businesses is the only feasible short-term response. Economic support and a triage system of confinement in Greater Sydney will be necessary to allow contact tracers to get on top of the outbreak. But the long-term solution is higher rates of vaccination for those who want it and learning to live with the virus. The real judgment on the Australian government response will be how successful it is in reopening the nation to the rest of the world.

The FT rightly has identified restrictions on citizens being allowed to leave their own country as another sign of complacency. It says the social and economic costs of adopting a hermit-nation stance are too large, especially for young people. We agree. The vaccine rollout has well-defined parameters. What comes next to open up the country knowing Covid-19 still exists in the world at large requires more attention. All citizens have a role to play in protecting their own health and contributing to the nation’s long-term interests.

The government has a duty to make the options available to citizens as wide and rewarding as possible.