Success of rollouts a mixed bag

MORE than 186 million people in more than 82 countries have received a COVID-19 vaccination, but some rollouts have been more successful.

Israel is leading the world with three quarters of its population getting at least one dose and 30 per cent receiving two.

Half the population of the United Arab Emirates has been jabbed and one in four people in the UK are covered. Even some tiny countries like the Seychelles have inoculated 58 per cent of its population.

Israel did mass vaccinations, paid more to get early supply and offered to share de-identified data with pharmaceutical company Pfizer. It says even though it paid twice as much for the Pfizer vaccine as Europe it was cheaper than the economic losses during lockdown.

FACEBOOK is behaving like a “corporate cowboy” and having a “massive tantrum” they wanted all Australians to notice, a leading University of Tasmania academic says.

Claire Konkes, the head of media in the School of Creative Arts and Media at UTAS, said despite the social media giant removing access to Australian news on its platform, it was an exciting time for the media industry.

“For many years we have watched new business models competing for dollars, and Facebook has taken a lot of money out of journalism,’’ she said.

“Social media is not new. We’ve watched it for more than a decade eating the guts out of existing news models.”

Dr Konkes said while Google had recently shown a willingness to compensate media companies for content that generated advertising revenue for them, Facebook had done the exact opposite.

“Facebook is the corporate cowboy saying, ‘we’re taking the cricket bat and going home’,’’ she said.

“What Facebook has said is ‘we will remove all the reliable, well-sourced content, and we will run the junk’.

“They are daring the Australian public to put up with that.

“They are having a massive corporate tantrum. They want everyone to notice and they are saying ‘you can’t live without us’.”

Dr Konkes said the best thing news organisations could do was to hold their ground and “keep providing the best product they can produce”.