Frontline medicos deserve better than this casual neglect

Vials of undiluted Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Picture: AFP

Talk about priorities. Brisbane is in lockdown, unvaccinated medics working in a COVID-19 ward have contracted the virus triggering a city-wide lockdown, and thousands more healthcare workers in the highest category of risk are still to receive the jab.

Yet the chief concern of the states is that they not be embarrassed.

“I am as angry as I have ever been in this 15 months of war against this virus,” NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard thundered.

And what exactly caused this fury? The federal Agriculture Minister’s ridiculous claim that the states had done “three-fifths of bugger all” in rolling out vaccines did not help, but the NSW government’s chief gripe was publication of figures that revealed how many doses of vaccine the states had been supplied by the commonwealth versus the proportion they had administered.

Perhaps it’s not the fairest of statistics. The states’ chief complaint seems to be that large quantities of vaccine were dumped on their doorstep and then included shortly afterwards in the figures of unadministered doses.

“Well, you get 45,000 items dumped on your front door at night and told ‘Now you should have it out by the next morning’. No one would be able to do that,” Hazzard said.

Fair enough, but the states have only themselves to blame if they don’t like the figures. They’re the ones that fought in national cabinet for comprehensive statistics on the vaccine rollout to be suppressed. Now all the public gets is a once-a-week global tally of vaccines administered. There’s no information about how many frontline healthcare staff have been vaccinated, or how many border and quarantine staff.

We’re not even told what proportion of Phase 1A is complete around the country. Requests for this information to the NSW health department are ignored. NSW has explicitly refused to publish the number of vaccines administered daily. And the federal government has refused to set a target on when Phases 1A and 1B will be complete. We are in large part flying blind, with few targets, little information and suboptimal transparency on this vaccine rollout.

The AMA has called for an end to the vaccine wars and greater transparency. It’s furious that a doctor and nurse in Queensland contracted coronavirus while working on a COVID-19 ward despite not having received a vaccination.

It’s also disturbed that Queensland insists it needs to stockpile doses of vaccine, despite assurances from the commonwealth that it had set aside second doses, which would be provided.

The issue highlights an appalling lack of trust between the two tiers of government that has left doctors and nurses on the frontline vulnerable and exposed, and may in fact be directly responsible for the infection of Queensland medics that has triggered outbreaks.

This is one of the worst aspects of our federation in action. Political wars over vaccine administration are another. The public deserves better than this. Doctors, nurses and those on the frontline of manning our borders most certainly do.