How to fix the Covid jab mess: Aussie vaccine expert reveals key to rollout

The Aussie vaccine expert who led the worldwide effort to eradicate polio has revealed the solution to Australia’s Covid jab woes.

The Aussie vaccine expert who led the worldwide effort to eradicate polio said the solution to Australia’s Covid jab woes is to make it as easy as possible to get the shot.

Governments need to bring the vaccinations to the people and set up walk in mass vaccination sites in areas where they are going about their daily lives.

Chris Maher ran the World Health Organisation’s vaccination programs in war and disaster zones in some of the most difficult and dangerous places on the planet including Syria and Afghanistan, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Under the program wild poliovirus cases plummet by more than 99 per cent from 350 000 cases in more than 125 countries in 1988 to just two cases in Pakistan and Afghanistan this year.

Now he’s back in Australia as UNICEF’s senior vaccine adviser.

“The main reason why people don’t get vaccinated, one of my old bosses used to say to me, is because they don’t have the opportunity,” he said.

“So the first thing is you have give the opportunity to people,” Mr Maher said.

“We have to be able to make it more accessible to people so they can get to it without having to drive halfway across the city to reach a mass vaccination site”.

‘Give the opportunity to people.’ UNICEF senior adviser Chris Maher.

The second thing governments have to do is encourage people to use the vaccine services, he said.

Creative advertising campaigns promoting the vaccine need to start now ahead of increased supply of vaccines because “if we don’t start moving on demand creation now we will regret it later,” he said.

The government also need to enlist community champions to spruik vaccines.

“In India with in the polio programs that were using Bollywood stars, we were using cricketers and well known, community activists,” Mr Maher said.

The multiple outbreaks around the country at the moment were a sign of things to come, if we don’t get our act together, he said.

Mass vaccination sites key to vaccinating the nation. Picture Getty Images

Lockdowns and border closures were essentially defensive measures “the only measure that you can use to actively change the circumstance around what happens at the moment is vaccination,” he said.

Australians had to understand they we would remain extremely vulnerable as a nation until everyone is vaccinated.

“We still have this huge slab of non-immune people that are a potential pool, if virus begins to move around and in my experience, one of the greatest spurs to rolling out immunisation is general community fear of disease and death,” he said.

“We’re seeing a situation where our risk is not declining over time,” he said.

Australians needed to understand Covid was not just a one off big wave that would soon disappear “it’s now a disease that endemic to humans”, he said.

“Whether we like it or not it will be circulating in human populations for a very long time to come. So, the risk of the virus being introduced and spreading remains a consistent risk,” he said.

Once people understood they would have their lives disrupted every time there’s an outbreak somewhere they will be more likely to get vaccinated, he said.

Originally published as How to fix the Covid jab mess: Aussie vaccine expert reveals key to rollout