Politics of the Covid-19 vaccine will run and run

Police officer Amanda Kuchel receives her first injection of COVID-19 vaccine at The Royal Adelaide Hospital. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Emma Brasier

The vaccine fiasco in Brisbane may, paradoxically, show just how safe vaccines are. If you can give four times the specified dose to people in their 80s and 90s and not cause a negative medical reaction in them, it’s pretty safe stuff. But the politics of vaccines is becoming fraught all around the world. Vaccines will dominate politics the way the virus has for the past 12 months.

It is a classically Australian stuff-up that there was not a double, triple, quadruple, super-redundant assurance that every­body involved in administering the initial vac­cines had gone through the required training.

Modern life is afflicted with endless compulsory online courses that instruct you on how to tie your shoe laces. But every now and again, as in when you’re administering a new and distinctive lifesaving vaccine to super-vulnerable people, one of them really is essential.

This is particularly unhelpful now because a crazy anti-vax sentiment is running loose in the wild fields of conspiracy madness that takes up so much of the time and energy of the chronically under-occupied. The Queensland incident will become totemic for the instinctive nutters among us, those drawn as though moths to a flame by every kooky bit of conspiracy tomfoolery on offer. In due course we will learn vaccines were invented by the lizard illuminati as part of the Great Reset being inflicted on the sovereign citizen at the behest of the New World Order etc.

The international politics of the vaccine are also increasingly important. Britain’s government led by Boris Johnson is universally thought to have made a mess of the early days of COVID-19. It was too slow to take COVID seriously. It was late to impose meaningful social distancing. And it was extremely reluctant to put in any serious border controls. As a result, it has had a shocking death rate, with more than 120,000 COVID deaths. It is only now instituting a limited form of hotel quarantine, modelled on Australia’s policies, for travellers from high-risk countries.

However, the great thing about intelligent conservatives is that they accommodate themselves to reality and they learn from experience. Where Britain has now done brilliantly is in vaccines. And its staggering success in vaccines is entirely due to the new independent status it has as a result of Brexit.

The EU performance on vaccines has been a disaster. It didn’t allocate enough money to vaccine production and purchase. It centralised all decision-making in Brussels, which is infallibly slow and generally wrong on all strategic questions. It got itself tied up in the usual bureaucratic knots. It suffered the normal Franco-German rivalry, with the French insisting the EU buy as many French vaccines as German ones, then not being able to bring the French supplies online on time.

Britain, because it is now a fully independent country, could do what Australia did. It allocated a serious amount of money, it hedged its bets by going after several different vaccines and its own native research effort was superb. It could use all its national purchasing power, and all its single government focus, to get one big job done, getting a lot of vaccines.

And then it could make the orderly but rapid rollout of those vaccines the highest national priority. The EU couldn’t do any of that. The EU is bigger than any one nation-state, but it is also much slower and more cumbersome. Originally, the EU was supposed to implement the principle of subsidiarity, which holds that decisions should be taken at the lowest level of government competent to take them.

In fact, the EU has implemented almost entirely the principle of anti-subsidiarity. Countless decisions that can and should be taken by national governments are taken by Brussels, after its labyrinthine, opaque and intensely dysfunctional internal processes.

The EU is not a nation in which a central government has the political and moral legitimacy to take tough decisions and implement them equitably across its regions. Nor is it, as it should be, a close association of independent nations that can define the things they co-operate on closely and the things each nation does independently. Rather, it occupies a tortured grey zone of overlapping incompetencies.

Total British vaccinations are heading towards 20 million. The most vulnerable groups have nearly all been vaccinated. There are still big challenges ahead. Some people, insanely in terms of their own interests and those of their families, are choosing not to be vaccinated. Eventually the EU will catch up but more Brits have been vaccinated than people in the whole of the EU. Numerous European nations have defied the EU’s central plans and moved to buy Russian or Chinese vaccines directly, despite the fact they have lower rates of efficacy than the Pfizer or AstraZeneca vaccines.

Another element of political culture favours the Brits as well. Despite the long and healthy habit of Anglo-Celtic scepticism, most Brits, like Australians, have faith in the basic competence and good intentions of their government, and that it generally tells the truth, not lies. As a result, vaccination rates are high. Continental Europe, with its long history of more extremist politics, has much less instinctive trust in government, especially in the EU. The wildest vaccine conspiracy theories and disinformation have travelled far and made deep inroads in Europe. Even in a country as normally rational as Germany, significant numbers of healthcare workers have refused the AstraZeneca vaccine.

The results from countries that have vaccinated heavily, especially Israel but some others as well, is that the vaccines are tremendously effective in stopping serious illness, have virtually negligible harmful side effects, and also look as though they drastically reduce transmission.

So here’s an inescapable conclusion. If you favour normal social interaction, and you want to get the economy moving as fast as possible, you will help the nation get to the highest vaccination rate possible.

Here’s a final thought. There is no case for making vaccination generally compulsory. Of course certain professions, such as doctors, police, ambos and some others, already have to have hepatitis vaccinations. And in the old days it was often necessary for travellers to have specific vaccinations for specific countries.

Here’s a nice conundrum for libertarians. Vaccination should never be generally compulsory. But should the state outlaw a voluntary association that wants to be entirely vaccinated? Should the heavy hand of the law prevent a business from providing a service to customers who value universal vaccination? The politics of vaccines will run and run.