
Holgate strikes back
Scott Morrison humiliated the wrong womanThursday, April 1, 2021
April fools
Why did the government miss its vaccination target by so much?
Health Minister Greg Hunt. Image via Sunrise
Brisbane’s snap lockdown has come to an end, but the controversy surrounding the latest outbreak and the severely delayed vaccine rollout has not. Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk lifted the lockdown at midday, five hours early, after announcing just one new case of community transmission, saying that “Easter is good to go”. (Easter may be, but Bluesfest is not, following its last-minute cancellation; more Byron Bay hotspots were added today.) NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian remained furious with her federal counterparts, saying that there had been “misleading information provided by the Commonwealth”, after the government and News Corp attempted to blame the states for delays, releasing figures suggesting they were stockpiling doses. Health Minister Greg Hunt – whose media team is reportedly refusing to answer calls from ABC Melbourne’s Virginia Trioli – went on Sunrise, The Today Show and Sky News instead, and blamed the media for reporting what his government had leaked. “The analysis was done by a particular journalist and that was their work,” he told Seven. “Our view is that the states are all doing a good job.” Hunt also used the media appearances to spruik the rollout’s progress, characterising where things are at now as “an extraordinary outcome”. So why, then, is Australia’s rollout – ranked 94th in the world – so behind schedule?
In perhaps the greatest April Fools’ Day joke thus far, the Department of Health insisted that the country is “not behind in its vaccine rollout”. Back in January, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said that the goal was to have 4 million vaccinated by the end of March. “We hoped, by the end of February, end of March, I should say, to have reached some 4 million population,” he said, with his special knack for misremembering dates. For weeks, media outlets have been tracking the vaccine numbers, measuring just how far off-track for that target we are. As of this morning, Australia had administered 670,000 doses, leaving us 3.3 million short of that initial target. To be fair, the end of March goal was later amended, but Guardian Australia’s tracker still puts us 1.1 million short of where we need to be to reach the revised goal.
As Liam Mannix reports in the Nine papers, there’s a reasonably simple explanation. Australia is one the world’s leaders in vaccine purchases per capita, with five doses for every man, woman and child. But while our Pfizer doses have been arriving without issue, the 3.8 million AstraZeneca doses Australia expected to receive from Europe before we got our local production up and running (the doses upon which our target was based) have not all arrived – partly because of AstraZeneca struggling to meet its own contracts, and partly due to European nations blocking exports. As of March 5, Australia had only received 735,000 of the 3.8 million doses it expected; this morning, Hunt said that 3.1 million doses still had not arrived.
There have also been a number of embarrassing, needless and criminally stupid logistical failings by the federal government – the most recent being its tendency to “blindside” states with unexpected and irregular bulk deliveries – making it unlikely that the government’s targets would be on track even if it had received its order in full. But nevertheless a great deal of the shortfall is easily explained by something that is out of its hands: international supply.
Which makes it all the more staggering, then, that the federal government yesterday chose to blame states for not having administered all their doses. On Sunrise this morning, Hunt went back to blaming the supply chain, noting that “global supply challenges” were responsible for the slow rollout, while Australian Medical Association president Omar Khorshid defended the rollout on Today, saying the “biggest barrier to vaccine rollout has been our supply”. Hunt suggested this morning that we were about to see things “dramatically scale-up” now that AstraZeneca is being produced locally.
It’s clear the states have not administered all their doses, whether or not that’s because – as some claim – they are hanging onto stock for second doses, not trusting when they are going to receive the next round from the federal government (could you blame them?). But they haven’t held onto 3.3 million of them, which makes the federal government’s blame-shifting attack all the more pointless, leaving premiers and health ministers fuming – even the ones within its own party. As NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard noted, the state has administered 100,000 of the 300,000 doses it has been tasked with in the current phase, while the federal government has only administered 50,000 of the 5.5 million they are responsible for. “I think the figures speak for themselves,” he said smugly. The true fools of the day are those in the federal government who chose to go after the still extremely popular state governments. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, as the saying goes. And seriously don’t bite the hands that’ve administered most of your vaccines.
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Holgate strikes back
Scott Morrison humiliated the wrong womanThe cost of delay
Delays, as we have sadly learnt, can mean the difference between life and deathVaccine rollout a (p)fizzer
The government came with good news, but the rollout remains a shamblesTrust fall
Supply issues aren’t the only thing hampering the vaccine rollout
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