Will the PM’s ‘new deal’ temper Covid jabs and cruelty?
Scott Morrison is trying to rebuild national cabinet from the rubble it was reduced to by the sniping Queensland Premier this week.
At Wimbledon this week, an unassuming scientist was given a standing ovation. Dame Sarah Gilbert seemed genuinely surprised by the respect and gratitude marking her efforts to develop the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. After half a minute the bespectacled and humble-looking Gilbert looked around, maybe hoping the spotlight was passing on to others, only for tennis fans to stand up and cheer even louder in honour of her work to help mankind.
This delightful 1min 44sec clip is an antidote to an utterly depressing week in Australia where the same lifesaving vaccine was trashed. One can only wonder what Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and her chief health officer, Jeannette Young, would have done that day at Wimbledon. Turned their backs?
Scott Morrison’s press conference after national cabinet met on Friday was the first to offer Australians some hope.
The Prime Minister outlined a sensible four-phase plan he called a “new deal” where, most critically, we focus on serious hospitalisations from Covid-19 rather than obsessing about the number of cases, treating Covid like the flu, using lockdowns only when there are escalating hospitalisations, allowing home quarantine for vaccinated travellers, returning the country to normal by stage four.
This plan can be judged accurately only when numbers are added to the thresholds – when we know what percentage of vaccinated people will move the country into each new phase.
It also remains to be seen whether the leaders of our federation will keep to any plan that is finally agreed. There is a long way to go. After all, this week Palaszczuk and Young exposed what can go wrong. Rising levels of incompetence and confusion during the pandemic have taken us into the realm of being cruel.
On Wednesday, Young directed people under 40 not to get the AstraZeneca vaccine: “I don’t want an 18-year-old in Queensland dying from a clotting illness who, if they got Covid, probably wouldn’t die.”
Chris Berg, a principal research fellow at RMIT University and an old-fashioned lover of reason and logic, described the warped equation like this: “We’ve found ourselves in a situation where it is riskier to take a vaccine because there’s almost no chance of catching Covid in Australia – but that’s only because we’ve closed the borders under the justification that we haven’t been vaccinated enough.”
It is ludicrous. And cruel that Young threw a spanner into the entire country’s vaccination program. Young is not chief GP with a remit to instruct young Queenslanders to steer clear of the AZ vaccine because it could kill them. She is a bureaucrat charged with understanding that the risk of dying from a blood clot is lower than being struck by lightning. Or dying from taking an aspirin.
The position of the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation remains unchanged: the AZ vaccine is available to all people, though ATAGI’s preference is that under-40s get the Pfizer jab because of a slightly increased risk of blood clotting.
Note what ATAGI co-chairman Allen Cheng said in April: “We carefully use the word ‘prefer’ (Pfizer over AZ) in younger people. We respect patient autonomy – that people have a choice about the vaccines and treatments they get.”
Young’s bizarre certainty attracted the ire of former federal deputy chief medical officer Nick Coatsworth: “Critical ethical principle of autonomy at stake here,” he tweeted. “Should not be paternalistic. Adults should be allowed to consent to an intervention with a 3 in 100,000 risk of thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome and less than 1 in 1,000,000 of death.”
Young ought to show young adult Australians greater respect. At 18 they can go to war, vote and make decisions about a vaccine, in consultation with their doctor. Which is exactly what the Prime Minister said on Monday night: speak to your GP, then decide on the AZ vaccine. That said, Morrison bears responsibility for confusion around vaccinations too, telling Australians a week ago that the AZ vaccine would be phased out by October, then bringing in a legal indemnity this week for doctors to administer the vaccine to under 40s.
This sort of confusion must stop. Otherwise we will never make it to phase four, where the country returns to normal.
Another nasty side to Covid has been the public shaming. Palaszczuk was the latest culprit of this cruelty this week, shaming an unvaccinated 19-year-old hospital worker, blaming her for the three-day lockdown. The same Premier took weeks to get a vaccine when it became available to people over 50. What impact might this public shaming have on a young woman? Did the politicking Palaszczuk consider that?
Covid cruelty has come in many forms. Police arrested a homeless woman in Perth’s CBD this week for not wearing a mask. Did they consider that she may have significant mental health issues, as many homeless people do? Is a prison cell the best we can do for this poor woman?
Earlier this month, Queensland’s chief health officer denied an exemption for a fully vaccinated woman who tested negative to Covid to see her newborn baby when she gave birth prematurely, while in quarantine. Some will be relieved when Young moves in November to Government House, where no big decisions are made.
Anna Coffey travelled from the US to Australia when her father was moved to palliative care in Melbourne. The student wrangled for days with health bureaucrats who demanded more and more documentation, then demanded that she charter a private plane to get from Sydney to Melbourne. After a charity offered to help her with that expense so she could see her dad before he died, she was granted an exemption to drive to Melbourne.
There is a sense of satisfaction from pointing the finger at hapless, nameless bureaucrats. Some of them have allowed power to go to their heads, making decisions that make their jobs easier rather than trying to find sensible, compassionate solutions.
But maybe we are to blame, too. Our subservience to lockdowns and other crazy rules has been reflected in polls that are consumed like superfoods by politicians.
And at a grassroots level, private hysteria has morphed into public nastiness, Australians dobbing on each other, verbally abusing nurses at Covid testing stations, harassing staff and business owners for exposing them to Covid, with nary a thought that they may have brought the virus into the business. Yes, the women of Double Bay in Sydney’s eastern suburbs know who I’m talking about.
Psychologist and deputy editor of Psyche magazine Christian Jarrett told Inquirer that politicians and the media have played to less appealing aspects of our human nature.
“For instance, by highlighting the idea that there are sensible people who follow the rules and there are ‘covidiots’, politicians and the media encourage division. They encourage a ‘them and us’ mentality, which can lead to a greater polarisation of opinion and people in each camp seeking ways to derogate those in the other camp.”
Speaking of “them and us”, national cabinet slashed the number of overseas arrivals, again. Palaszczuk wins the gold medal for Covid hypocrisy, complaining that people should not be allowed to travel overseas for business. So, she will then cancel her trip to Tokyo for the Olympics. Yeah, no.
The Prime Minister is trying to rebuild national cabinet from the rubble it was reduced to by the sniping Queensland Premier this week. The outline of an agreed four-phase plan may settle the nerves of Australians, inviting more calm, kindness and logic into their attitude to Covid.
As Morrison said on Friday, “we are prisoners of our own success”. As prison warden he can lead the way, moving us past some of the worst cruelties of Covid faster, where, for example a son must plead with a bureaucrat to see his dying dad.
To move us out of the current confused mess, he needs to demand all hands on deck, immediately, to deliver a clever, convincing and widespread advertising campaign to instil confidence in Covid vaccines, including AstraZeneca. Morrison’s background is in marketing, so the skills are there.
Inaction will serve only to bolster those conspiracy-minded anti-vaxxers who use confusion to trash vaccines that will save Australian lives.
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