Coronavirus vaccine misinformation drive will develop no traction

Member for Hughes, Craig Kelly, speaks to the media over his concerns with the AstraZeneca vaccine and blood clotting during a press conference at Parliament House on Tuesday.

If a couple of lonely and contrarian backbenchers dispossessed of medical insight can panic Australians out of vaccination, the collective sanity of the nation is deeply imperilled.

Hopefully, and so far evidently, it is not the case.

Yet Scott Morrison and Health Minister Greg Hunt need to tread carefully in dealing with Nationals senator Matt Canavan and former Liberal MP Craig Kelly’s latest missives on vaccine efficacy.

The government’s entire economic agenda, freedom of movement for Australians, the health and wellbeing of the country and indeed the Prime Minister’s own political position are at risk if the vaccine program shows any sign of faltering.

Morrison learned quickly from his first encounter with Kelly that the fringes matter.

Having given him far too much rope at first by suggesting he was an irrelevancy, he moved too far the other way in a public dressing down that served only to give Kelly a bigger megaphone.

In now dealing with Canavan, who appears to have missed the irony of his willingness to follow a European lecture on anything, Morrison and Hunt have decided to adopt a traditional counter-intelligence strategy.

They have been direct in their language in saying that Canavan’s position was not that of the government while resisting the hyperventilation that would otherwise give the views a larger dose of oxygen.

Anthony Albanese was quick to see the political opportunity by goading the government to censure Canavan, as if to suggest that his voice alone could single-handedly undermine public confidence in the program.

As one government source said, “any intelligence expert will tell you that when dealing with a misinformation campaign, you have to be measured in the response, address it directly but without inflating it and giving it legitimacy”.

The view at the outset based on the government’s research was there was always going to be a cohort of about 30 per cent who said they’d probably get the vaccine but wanted to wait until they were confident it wouldn’t kill them or make them sick.

Another 10 per cent said they would never get it and would never be convinced.

That left 60 per cent who said they would get it done and trusted the medical and health experts who have guided the nation through the pandemic.

While not ignoring the 30 per cent, Hunt and health experts are throwing their weight into the larger group.

And on this, they are running a race against time to get as many of those vaccinated as soon as possible.

It is the monkey see, monkey do approach. The more people who get vaccinated, the less hesitant the rest will become.

And it is this group who may have pause for thought if they see or read about a government MP ventilating what Australian medical experts claim are scientifically unfounded concerns about AstraZeneca.

It can only be assumed that Canavan, who is regarded as very bright, is motivated by a belief that this is an issue that could play against the LNP in Queensland when dealing with Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.