Anthony Albanese mocks Coalition’s new Covid vaccine ad as revamped campaign falls flat
The Morrison government’s latest attempt at a vaccination campaign urging Australian’s to “arm themselves” has landed flat, with even the opposition leader quipping it would be difficult for the nation’s satirists to send up.
Anthony Albanese said the campaign, released 18 months into the pandemic, didn’t quite “cut it”.
“It will be very difficult for Shaun Micallef to send this ad up,” he said while being interviewed on the ABC’s Insiders program.
“What we need is taking the expertise Australia has always done so well. We were the best in the world in the campaign against Aids, we’ve done drink-driving very well, but after 18 months if this is the best they can do, they need to go back to the drawing board.”
Albanese said while Morrison was “the advertising guy” this campaign fell short of what public health messaging needed to do.
“This is a government that has spent [a lot of dollars] advertising itself, telling Australians how good it is. Maybe they should translate some of that advertising into this.”
But with the worsening situation in New South Wales, a Sydney specific campaign will begin from Sunday night, which chief medical officer Prof Paul Kelly warned warned was “graphic”.
“We are only doing this because of the situation in Sydney and it will be running in Sydney. The messages will be clear: stay-at-home, get tested and book in for a vaccination. They are the three messages on that ad, so watch out for that, it is quite graphic and it is meant to be graphic, it is meant to really push that message home that is important.”
A government spokesperson said this ad was aimed at “younger cohorts” who were being affected more by the Delta variant than previous variants.
“The clip encourages people in NSW to book their vaccination, but also to highlight the need to stay home and get tested.”
Fifteen people with Covid are in intensive care in Sydney hospitals, including a teenager.
The nationwide campaign, which is targeted at the broader population, features various biceps and asks people to “arm themselves” with the vaccine to protect their family, co-workers and community.
Australia’s vaccination program began in February, but the only advertisement to accompany it was a departmental ad featuring respiratory and infectious diseases specialist Dr Nick Coatsworth, who had been a deputy chief health officer and now advises on the response.
The newly installed head of the vaccine rollout, Lt Gen John Frewen, admitted last month the delay in a vaccine campaign had been on purpose, with concerns demand for Australia’s mRNA vaccines, recommended for under 60s, would outstrip supply.
Then, Frewen said the vaccine program was still in the “rallying” phase. “Arm yourself” is part of the next phase, with Australia’s supplies of mRNA vaccines scheduled to increase in the coming months.
Frewen said the new campaign was just the “next step” and there would be more to come.
“This is another phase of the campaign and we are going to build the campaign progressively towards the end of the year,” he said.
“It is really October, November and December where we had the vast amounts of vaccine coming through. So we do wish to build up through the year. ‘Arm yourself’ will over the next month or so, be adapted to help bring in the community and get the community to start participating. It is very tailorable to specific regions a specific language and cultural groups, as I mentioned, but I do anticipate that you will see those kinds of things that you have highlighted that later in the year.”
The government had been relying on AstraZeneca to act as the backbone of its program, banking on the domestically produced vaccine to vaccinate the majority of the population.
That unravelled in April when the expert health advisory panel, Atagi, changed its advice for who the AstraZeneca vaccine should be recommended for. Since then, the government has been playing catch up but has been at the mercy of the queue for mRNA vaccines, which, in the agreements struck by the Morrison government, don’t start coming in numbers which will make enough of a difference until at least September.
Labor has been increasingly critical of the government’s handling of the pandemic.
“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail, and that’s what has happened here,” Albanese said on Sunday.
“We didn’t do enough deals with enough pharmaceutical companies to get enough vaccines soon enough. The government was too busy out there itself saying, ‘We are at the front of the queue.’ We are last in the developed world for the rollout of the vaccine and we are not in the top 100 countries.”
The Sydney Delta outbreak has put even more strain on the program, with Scott Morrison rejecting any suggestion his government shares responsibility for the situation Australia’s largest city is facing. Morrison said Australia was only two months behind its original vaccination schedule and even under the first most optimistic vaccine targets, not enough of the population would have been vaccinated to handle the Delta variant. Under those targets, the government had aimed to have had more than 20m doses of the vaccine issued.
There is still conjecture over how much of the Australian population will need to be vaccinated before Australia can begin reopening to the rest of the world. Morrison said the government had asked the Doherty Institute to work on modelling, which is due by the end of the month. New South Wales premier Gladys Berejiklian has named 80% as the ideal figure. Just 10% of NSW residents have been vaccinated so far.