From ‘it’s not a race’ to ‘go for gold’: how Scott Morrison pivoted on Australia’s Covid vaccine rollout

It is the phrase the prime minister used repeatedly at the start of the Covid-19 vaccine rollout: “It’s not a race.” As Australia lags behind much of the world in getting jabs into arms, his choice of words has come back to haunt him.

Scott Morrison’s critics accuse him of attempting to rewrite history by claiming he wasn’t talking about getting people vaccinated when he uttered the now infamous phrase, but the regulatory approval process that preceded it.

“When we made those remarks, we were talking about the regulation of the vaccines. I’m not sure if people are aware of that,” Morris told Seven’s Sunrise program on Thursday.

However, the Pfizer vaccine was approved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) on 25 January and AstraZeneca on 16 February, but the first recorded mention of “not a race” wasn’t until March, when the vaccine rollout had already commenced.

10 March

Morrison said it at a press conference on 10 March after more than 100,000 vaccine doses had already been administered. The prime minister was not the first person to say it, it was the secretary of the health department, Prof Brendan Murphy, who first uttered the line when asked about when Australia would get to 1m doses administered:

11 March

Morrison ran with this line on Sunrise on 11 March when asked whether the vaccine rollout had been slow in some states. He initially credited Murphy:

On the same day on Nine’s Today Show he repeated it when asked if Australia would meet its October deadline for the vaccine rollout:

And then at a doorstop when asked if Australia would still open international borders as planned by the end of October:

14 March

Then Morrison was asked at a doorstop in Castle Hill in Sydney’s north-west about whether Australia was still on target to have everyone receive their second dose of vaccine by the end of October. He indicated GPs meeting targets could get more vaccine to meet demand:

31 March

In Adelaide he was again asked about the slow vaccine rollout, and repeated Australia was on track for its October deadline:

Since then, the prime minister stopped using the phrase, and it only appears in press conferences or interview transcripts when the phrase is being repeated back to the prime minister. Now with the Olympics buoying the spirit of Australians stuck in lockdown, Morrison has had a change of heart on sporting analogies when it comes to the vaccine.

“What we want to do is make sure we hit, hit these targets, set these targets right,” Morrison said of the vaccine rollout on Wednesday. “And, then all of Australia, like our Olympians, we go for gold on, on getting those vaccination rates where we need to go, because the supply’s there, the distribution’s there, the pharmacists, the GPs, the clinics, and we make a, we make a gold medal run all the way to the end of this year.”