We’ll be lucky if our apathy doesn’t cost us dearly in a race we pretend doesn’t exist
Scott Morrison insists the scramble to vaccinate the Australian population against coronavirus is “not a race”. But we’ll soon find out that there are no prizes for coming last, writes Dennis Atkins
Australia has a sad affection for mediocrity and apathy. We revel in the idea we are a “lucky country”, taking journalist and historian Donald Horne’s observation as a literal expression of our fortune.
We are still a lucky country, in the sense Horne intended, “run by second-rate people who share its luck”. It’s one of the phrases that identify and damn us. Along with “she’ll be right” and “no worries”.
Now, with a prime minister who idolises and exploits apathy, we have a new phrase to describe our “luck”.
We can add “it’s not a race” to this sorry collection of maxims.
Scott Morrison says he was quoting his Health Department chief executive and former chief health officer, Brendan Murphy, when he first used the phrase but it is his own. Just like “I don’t hold a hose mate”.
Morrison used the phrase because he didn’t want to take responsibility for yet another short-coming in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. Any rigorous examination of how this health and economic crisis has been handled exposes the prime minister as being late to recognise what was needed, unwilling to shoulder genuine responsibility and finger-snapping quick to divert attention and shift blame.
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This stuff is second nature to Morrison and the vaccination saga has all of this scrawled across it like railway carriage graffiti.
Morrison’s predecessor Malcolm Turnbull called it a “phenomenal” policy failure: “I can’t think of a bigger black-and-white failure of public administration than this.”
He’s right, although it’s a crowded field of candidates with an alarming proportion of these policy failures occurring in the last decade or so.
As evidence around the world shows, there is no genuine progress against the virus without high vaccination levels – somewhere between two thirds and four fifths is regarded as a floor. This has been obvious for 12 months but we are only war-gaming possible problems with the vaccine rollout today, July 6, 2021. It beggars belief.
The government knew from the second quarter of last year there was a promising number of vaccines in development. The ground-breaking mRNA technology – which teaches human cells how to make a protein to fight the targeted disease – was on the drawing board of Moderna and Pfizer within hours of COVID-19 being sequenced in mid-January 2020.
The other main vaccine path – the viral vector route used by the Oxford University team behind AstraZeneca – was in serious trials by April last year.
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It wasn’t as though we weren’t on full alert that vaccine development was running ahead of anything thought possible when the pandemic was upon us and having a full-tested candidate by last Christmas was a very real option.
Despite this, Australia lagged in every sense of the word. We placed our bets on the viral vector path, with faith placed in the Oxford University work and another vector-based possibility being developed by the University of Queensland team.
It seems there were two reasons for this. First is the understandable and sensible quest to have a sovereign domestic vaccine manufacturing industry. Morrison was always right to push this but the remaining questions are whether we put too many bets on this route alone and if the policy was driven by cost considerations.
We didn’t seem to have enough enthusiasm or urgency in procurement or supply. Initial discussions with Pfizer, which was really at the head of the queue in producing a robust and dependable vaccine, were not serious enough, too constrained by detail and conditions. Along with their main competitor, Moderna, Pfizer knew it was a race.
Maybe these numbers have something to do with it. The AstraZeneca vaccine costs $US4 a dose while Pfizer has a price tag of $US20 a hit and Moderna is valued at $US32 to $US37. We can only hope these factors were not instrumental in the decision to bet big on AstraZeneca.
We have 50 million Pfizer doses here or on order with some supplies rolling in slowly and intermittently – in the thousands, not the millions until the September/October period at least. The bulk of supply will come during the last quarter although a proportion of these 50 million doses won’t arrive until next year.
According to the Morrison Government, Australia’s vaccine effort will switch sharply from the viral vector AstraZeneca horse to the mRNA duo, Pfizer and Moderna with a trumpeted 2.2 million doses a week arriving by mid-September.
This might best be placed in the “believe it when you see it” tray. As Menzies Centre for Health Policy professor Lesley Russell explains, the devil of all this is in the detail.
“An agreement to secure 25 million doses of Moderna was announced in May, but the vaccine is yet to be approved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration,” says Russell. “An agreement to purchase Novavax (a protein-based vaccine) also apparently exists; but phase 3 clinical trials have yet to conclude, so hopes for its availability in 2021 are very optimistic.”
So, it wasn’t a race – certainly not in the mind of the prime minister who seemed to think he’d done so well steering the health and economic ships through the choppy pandemic waters in most of 2020 he could cruise into 2021. He was going to usher in the old normal.
It was complacency and apathy. The next phase of dealing with COVID should have been tied to a robust, comprehensive and rigorous vaccination rollout.
We are not in that race in a meaningful sense and last week’s four phases of the (waning) moon is a mix of public relations and bureaucratic jargon. In reality, this is an alarming failure of public policy and a shameful disregard for the national interest.
