Making up for lost time: Australia needs to speed up to stay in the Covid vaccine race
As the New South Wales winter Covid outbreak gets ready to head into spring and exponential growth remains the order of the day, more Australians are getting vaccinated than ever before. But while the strong surge of people protecting themselves and their community grows, it does not hide the fact that our vaccine rollout began far too slowly, and we’re now playing catchup.
Six weeks ago, as the concern about the Sydney outbreak reached the stage of Scott Morrison beginning to regret praising NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian for not going into a snap lockdown, the Australian government rolled out an advertising campaign trying to scare people into getting the vaccine.
I cannot say how successful it was but, if my daily 14 hours of TV consumption during the Olympics is any judge, it was seen by no one.
But oh, how sweet those days look now. Sure, the cases were increasing at an exponential rate, but at worst there were about 100 a day. Not now.
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Now, sure, lockdowns and masks and quarantines are needed but the only way to reach any semblance of normality with the Delta variant (and the subsequent Greek letter variants to come) is through vaccination.
Back when I last did the data sample, Australia was coming a very poor last among all OECD nations for people who had been fully vaccinated (assuming that two doses is “fully”).
Things were not so terrible among those who had had at least one dose – we were only third last.
Now things have changed. A bit. No longer are we last for fully vaccinated; we are now fourth last. And among those with at least one dose we have gone from third last among the OECD to … err … second last.
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The prime minister suggested early this month that in parliament: “It doesn’t matter how you start the race, it is how you finish the race. It is how you finish the race.”
That of course is idiotic.
Given we started so far behind Europe and North America, there really is no way we can catch up.
But as I noted last time, given the late start is essentially a sunk cost that we can’t recover, the best we can do is at least roll out the vaccine as fast or faster than other nations – or in Morrison’s analogy, increase the pace we run at in the race.
The problem is that after the first 140 days of our vaccine rollout (essentially where we were about 9 July), we were still in the bottom half of the OECD.
And now, 40 days later, we’re not doing much better.
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After 180 days of our vaccine rollout, 42% of Australians (including those younger than 16) had at least one dose, compared with the OECD median of 50%, 61% in the UK and 65% in Canada (which had a policy of first dose fast).
You can see that the rollout pace remains poor, even with the extra urgency that has come from the NSW outbreak in the past 70 days.
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This is not to say things aren’t improving – but it takes time when you start so badly.
The good thing is that Australians are now getting vaccinated at quite a strong rate – well above the pace of the OECD median at this stage of the rollout.
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But that’s because our pace of vaccinations has been so slow for the past four months, and especially so for the past 10 weeks.
In the middle of June, when we should have been busy getting vaccinations, some governments and parts of the media were busy scaring people (and preventing those younger than 60) from getting the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Not surprisingly the pace of vaccinations fell. And while it did increase, it took until last week to get above the pace of the rest of the OECD was at this stage of the rollout.
That’s lost time.
At day 50, 100 and 150 of our rollout the number of people getting vaccinated was well in the bottom half of the OECD. Now at least we are ahead of the pack – but only because we need to be.
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At this stage of their rollouts, the UK had vaccinated 61% of its population compared with 42% of Australia’s. Little wonder that the pace of their vaccinations had began to slow.
But there is some small hope. Our rate of new vaccinations is growing quickly – somewhat in line with that of Canada in the same period.
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The problem is Canada got its vaccines well before ours, and did not waste the past few months as we did.
We need to make up for lost time and, while the rate of our vaccinations is very good, it will need to keep growing if we want to finish the race any time soon.