The context for this - all through 2020 the Australian government complained from the sidelines that State governments were too conservative and lockdowns should have been ended much sooner. The two major responsibilities they had were quarantine - which they totally abrogated to the States - and ultimately vaccination.
Vaccination rates are currently only at 4%, initially due to shortages and now what looks like an attitude among people that there’s no rush as case numbers are so low, and a government that is talking about opening international borders in 2022. When the medical community, which throughout has been conservative and science-led are telling you you’re not moving fast enough to open borders maybe there’s a chance you’re too slow.
You had one job (constitutionally two, but you totally gave one away).
I don’t like the tone of the reporting, which seems to pitch that the medical community is against non-pharmaceutical measures to continue. I don’t believe this narrative to be true. The reliance on it is their point of trouble, I would bet.
(Just FTR, below 1000 deaths is amazing. Mind-blowing, even.)
4 % vaccination rate is, OTH, abysmal.
I pull this screenshot from twitter, because someone made a good translation which spares me the trouble:
This is from last week’s episode of the Das Coronavirus Update podcast, running for more than a year now, with Christian Drosten (who is actually doing research on Corona viruses). He has been a constant source of reliable information and assessments.
ETA: the Podcast currently is weekly, one week with Drosten, the other with Sandra Ciesek (Univ. of Frankfurt a.M., specialist for Hepatitis C virus).
We are so incredibly lucky to have those two researchers who commit to public outreach. I can’t tell you how often these two and their hosts grounded me when I was angry and exhausted (e.g. by digging for reliable information in a shitload of information and misinformation).
We’ve only ever eradicated one disease (smallpox). And there are important differences between COVID and smallpox that makes the former much harder to eradicate- most notably, people with COVID are infectious before they develop symptoms, and it has animal reservoirs.
(We were close to eradicating polio before the CIA fucked it up, but I think that is also easier to eradicate- no animal reservoirs, and while people are infectious before they develop symptoms it’s not airborne.)
It’s highly unlikely to eradicate SARS-CoV-2. People who are fully vaccinated can catch the virus, and pass it on. Even if this is just a small fraction, the virus can thus stay in circulation. Additionally, some immunoescape do always occur in Coronaviruses, and the immune response to Coronaviruses usually isn’t life-long in any case, but gradually declines (in a rather fast pace, compared to some other viruses, but WDKS about this specific virus, so there’s room for happy surprises), but does not usually vanishes completely.
Bottom line: see the screenshot above. At one point in your life, you will very, very probably get infected.
It would currently be prudent to try to push this day as far in the future as you can. And if you can, get vaccinated.
Spot on - that’s exactly the issue, and any ambiguity reflects the quality of our media. The Australian Medical Association (AMA) has worked tirelessly in the last 15 months to support social distancing, mask-wearing and other forms of risk mitigation and they’re not changing their views now.
I suspect what they are doing is responding to an apathy to vaccinate by proposing a more urgent (but reasonable) deadline to drive people to get a jab. The reluctance to vaccinate in Aus is generally * not idealogical - it’s mostly driven by the Aussie “yeah, no worries; no rush” attitude. Give Australians a nice carrot (“you can travel OS when most of us are vaccinated”) and a blunt stick (“if we open the borders next week you’re at risk unless you’re vaccinated”) and we respond pretty well. We’re a just-in-time culture, not because we’re efficient but because we’re lazy.
The Kiwis are also perceived (by my peer group) as quite laid back, culturally. I wonder if there are similarities re: policies and vaccinations right now.
Well there’s also the part where they have been working normally, going out and socializing normally, and attending mass events normally, for ages. They weren’t first in the queue for vaccines and weren’t that concerned that they weren’t because they dealt with it properly in the first place.
