Young Australians don’t need a Covid ‘wake-up call’. We need to be vaccinated
In Wednesday’s grim press conference that confirmed Sydney’s lockdown was to be extended another week, the state’s chief health officer, Dr Kerry Chant, revealed that of the 37 people now being treated for Covid in New South Wales hospitals, eight were under the age of 35. One person in intensive care is in their 30s.
These facts, she said, should serve as a “bit of a wake-up call to young people”.
The implication seemed to be that young people (and who in their 30s doesn’t feel blessed to still be classed as such?) are operating with dangerous complacency, mistakenly believing they’re immune to the worst effects of the pandemic, and should adjust their behaviour accordingly – take fewer risks, protect themselves better.
Chant’s comment was no doubt well-intentioned – she exudes competence and was no doubt hoping the warning would keep more people safe.
But across the country group chats and social media exploded with indignation.
Eighteen months into the pandemic, young people don’t need a “wake-up call”. We need to be vaccinated.
Young adults have spent 2021 at the back of the vaccine queue, waiting for higher priority groups, such as the elderly, or those who work in quarantine or aged care, to receive the jab first. No sensible person objects to this system, prioritising those more likely to die from Covid or at the coalface of critical industries is unequivocally the right thing to do.
I felt a palpable sense of relief when my retiree parents were vaccinated – bringing an end to this strange period of role reversal where, as Brigid Delaney put it, we found ourselves berating our parents for going out.
Besides, we believed, it wouldn’t take too long before we had the chance to get vaccinated too. Scott Morrison told us last November that Australia was at the “front of the queue” internationally for vaccines. A month later his health minister, Greg Hunt, pledged the country would be “fully vaccinated” by October.
That’s how it started. But how it’s going? Oh boy. Those promises, and so many that have come after, proved meaningless in a rollout that has been an omnishambles of missed targets, supply problems, unequal distribution and poor government messaging. Olympians and politicians vaccinated before aged care workers and people with disabilities. Empty lines at city vaccine hubs during the early stages of the rollout. Too many eligible people who can’t or won’t get vaccinated.
Just 7.92% of people aged over 16 had been fully vaccinated by the start of July.
Most young people, particularly in NSW, are still waiting at the back of that queue, and they’re growing increasingly frustrated. Everyone I know is eager to be vaccinated, to protect themselves from a potentially debilitating disease, and to help move Australia out of the era of lockdowns and closed borders that have robbed us of rites of passage and contact with family and friends overseas, curtailing careers, relationships and study.
I spent much of 2020 despairing for friends in the United States as Covid raged out of control. Now I envy them their hot vaxxed summer from locked down Sydney.
Morrison’s surprise announcement last week that people aged under 40 could ask their GPs for an AstraZeneca shot seemed at first to be a glimmer of hope. Many rushed out to book their vaccines. But Morrison’s comments were quickly followed by more of the chaos that has characterised the whole rollout, as doctors, chief health officers and some politicians, blindsided by the announcement, contradicted the PM, and instead urged young people to keep waiting, emphasising the advice from the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation, that Pfizer remained the preferred shot for this cohort.
My own doctor urged me not to get an AZ shot the following day, and I know of many who were turned away from clinics, and told to wait for Pfizer to become available.
There are already signs of frustration that this situation is diminishing the sense of social goodwill that powered Australia through the early stages of the pandemic. Young people who assiduously followed the rules for 18 months are snagging Pfizer doses where they can, according to numerous media reports, booking through widely distributed illicit links or just showing up to vaccination centres to see if there are any spare shots at the end of the day.
“I say if you can get it, get it,” said one friend, who has otherwise been a swottish rule follower. Many people don’t feel they’re queue jumping if they no longer believe a queue even exists.
Moreover, this situation is turbocharging the sense of intergenerational resentment and betrayal by the political class that already exists among young people in Australia. If you thought being locked out of the housing market was infuriating, wait until you’re locked out of a potentially lifesaving medical advance.
There are still many groups who urgently need the vaccine more than the general population of healthy young people – including the still unvaccinated elderly, aged care workers and those in disability care. But we eagerly await vaccines being made widely available to all of us.
Complacency is a threat. But it’s the complacency of federal leaders who continue to bungle the vaccine rollout, not the people still waiting to be vaccinated.