Vaccine rollout should be an open and shut case

The pandemic has turned us back to our roots. We’re once again a prison island.

The Prime Minister’s greatest failure in the pandemic has been to tolerate the drastic and delinquent overreach of the premiers. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

The pandemic has turned us back to our roots. When the British settled this continent in 1788, they ­established a prison island; now, once more, people are not allowed to leave the place, and we submit to unprecedented levels of authoritarian control.

We have banned overseas visitors too, of course, and thousands of expats are stuck overseas. Imagine being an Aussie, and not being able to come home. As if that is not bad enough, we have had overzealous state governments preventing us from travelling around our own country, locking down cities and mandating masks.

It is worth noting that without any involvement from the Taliban, we have endured a year in which weddings, singing and dancing have been banned. We can have no confidence that a clutch of infections will not send some panicked and power-crazed premier back down that path.

This over-reaction is extraordinary given COVID-19 has been effectively kept out of our country through hotel quarantine, and cross-infections can be contained with relatively minimal disruption, as NSW has demonstrated. Rather than get through this thing with the lightest touch, and the least drawdown on the financial resources of future generations, we seem to have decided this is the challenge of the century and we need to throw everything at it.

Let me reject outright the ridiculous retort we often receive in these debates which is to say the only alternative is what we have seen unfold in Milan or New York City. It is not a zero sum game. No one would argue we accept a “let it rip” attitude (although it should be pointed out that factors such as weather, population density and healthcare capacity would have prevented our country from suffering as badly as others, even under that approach).

Our opportunity has been to make the most of our relatively COVID-free life behind sealed borders. That challenge remains, and we also need to push towards reopening global engagement. But we seemingly are still preoccupied with remaining completely COVID-free at all costs, surrendering elements of our present and future to survive a once-in-a-­century scourge.

This is mistaken. The global threat pales compared to two world wars last century, the Cold War, or the Spanish Flu pandemic that killed children and healthy young adults. COVID-19 is a long way from Ebola, case fatality rates have steadily fallen with improved treatments, children and healthy adults have never been at serious risk, and the vulnerable are a known cohort of the elderly and the sick.

The world faces deadly health challenges every year but because they occur mainly in developing countries, they receive insufficient attention. In 2019, more than 400,000 people died from malaria and another 1.4 million died from tuberculosis.

Yet we have a media and political system that goes into panic ­because a vaccine for a virus that poses no serious threat to healthy young adults might cause blood clotting in one in 200,000 of these healthy adults, should they choose to take it. We suddenly have incredibly effective vaccines available in record time and they have already inoculated more than 1.2 million Australians who are either vulnerable or in the front line.

The priority must be to vaccinate six million elderly Australians within the next couple of months. Much of the media hysteria seems feigned given there is zero community transmission of this disease behind our hotel quarantine at present. That can and most likely will change, but still.

The panic over vaccine options continues. There is a selfish streak in this — we want our jabs now even though there is nothing to protect against at the moment and other countries coming out of the northern winter remain in crisis.

Incredibly, we were told by Health Minister Greg Hunt this week that even if we were all vaccinated it would not clear the way for open international borders. A country of nervous nellies has pulled up the drawbridge and is not of a mind to rejoin the world.

Two days later, Scott Morrison was more encouraging, flagging additional travel bubbles, first with Singapore, and suggesting a system of permissible travel for vaccinated travellers who might quarantine at home upon return.

It is an improvement, but think about the overbearing control; we need permission to leave our country and still must quarantine on return.

The airlines, at least, are applying pressure, with Qantas boss Alan Joyce urging an accelerated path to open borders. At least domestic routes are busy again, subject to any future conniptions from state governments. We must demand an end to state border ­closures.

Given all the medical advice and advances over the past year, we should be nearing a situation where we would open our inter­national borders to anyone who is vaccinated and tests negative. Certainly, once we have vaccinated our six million most vulnerable this is where our national debate should focus, rather than on extending isolation and restrictions.

Over 15 months of pandemic, this country has seen 910 deaths either from or with COVID-19. Only five of those people were under 50, while 853 were over 70. Three quarters of all the deaths were in aged care services; the statistics include people who contracted the virus in palliative care.

From the very early weeks of the pandemic, the obvious solution was to ringfence the only truly vulnerable cohort — the elderly. Clearly, that was almost impossible to do without effective vaccines. Once we have vaccinated all of the elderly, and those who live and work with them, we must return to near normal behaviour.

It is true that what I express might be a minority view, because polling, election results and public forums continually remind us about the popularity of the state government overreactions. But just because you are in the minority does not make you wrong, and I take my cues from ongoing discussions with the best epidemiological and medical experts in the country and by reading widely on the results here and around the world. There is no doubt that apart from preventing uncontrolled outbreaks and ensuring health capacity was not overwhelmed, the real challenge of this pandemic has been corralling political, media and public hysteria. On that score we have failed.

The toilet roll fetish is exhibit A. Even after Victoria got on top of its self-inflicted outbreak, we have had four major cities locked down unnecessarily over outbreaks that the data shows were controlled ­before the lockdowns even came into effect.

We have had curfews and border closures that triggered more social and economic harm than good. But the public and much of the media applauds.

The media hype has pure sensationalism, tallies of infections drummed up as disastrous news even when half of them are asymptomatic. One Sydney Morning Herald headline will always stay with me, warning about a new strain of the virus being particularly dangerous because it produced no symptoms — the disease you get when you don’t get a ­disease.

Reports in the New York Post have quoted a CNN technical director boasting about how they have fuelled coronavirus alarm as a ratings bonanza. “Which is why we constantly have the death toll on the side,” he said, noting it “would make our point better” if the death toll were higher.

This merely confirms what we can see in coverage here and abroad. And the political edge is obvious too, with the left of centre bias seeing leaders such as Andrew Cuomo in New York and Daniel Andrews in Victoria lauded for presiding over disasters, while there is desperation to sheet blame home to Scott Morrison for European failures on vaccine supply.

The Prime Minister’s greatest failure in the pandemic has been to tolerate the drastic and delinquent overreach of the premiers. To be fair, he has been constrained by the pragmatic realities of the ­Federation, but he has also been too timid to take them on when they were riding waves of populist support.

The Canberra press gallery narrative is that reinstituting ­national cabinet is a ploy by Morrison to share the blame over vaccine rollouts, which is the typical spin we get. There is a germ of truth in it but clearly, as in all service delivery, it is the states that have the people and facilities on the ground, and they will be predominant in getting the jabs done. Canberra’s main role is ensuring vaccine supply.

Frankly, if you are under 50 and healthy it is hard to see why you would be bothered about vaccination one way or the other. But if we are not going to open our international borders and finally learn to live with the disease once all our vulnerable are vaccinated, then the rollout will have been a waste of time and money.