Let’s inoculate at-risk Australians then send Covid vaccines overseas
Australia is poised to roll out Covid-19 vaccines later this month, with the goal of vaccinating as many Australians as quickly as possible. This is not the strategy the world needs now.
Vaccinate our most vulnerable citizens, health workers and hotel quarantine staff immediately – no question about that.
As for the rest of us? We can wait. While we have been inconvenienced and, in many cases, hurt financially and personally by restrictions on what we can do, where we can go, lockdowns and even border closures, we need to applaud our success so far in limiting the spread of Covid-19 in this country and accept ongoing reasonable restrictions for the sake of the greater good.
There are some clear ethical and practical reasons for this approach. Most fit and healthy Australians can afford to wait but the rest of the globe is still burning from this insatiable virus. Countries grappling with Covid-19 should have priority access to available vaccines for their most at-risk citizens.
There are not that many vaccine production factories globally. After the most at-risk Australians are jabbed with the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines, we should export much of the AstraZeneca vaccine we are making now in Melbourne to countries that need it more than us – as either sales or foreign aid.
If rich countries like Australia don’t export any of the vaccines they produce, then poor countries aren’t going to get much at all for quite a while. Australia has committed to financial aid and other assistance to countries in the Pacific and south-east Asia, including the supply of vaccines surplus to our needs. This is a good start but Australia is in an enviable position with its handling of the pandemic and can do more. Much more.
Australia has contracted supplies of enough coronavirus vaccines to inoculate the entire Australian population not once, not twice, but thrice. That’s the kind of hoarding problem among rich countries that the World Health Organization has been warning us about.
Norway and several other countries have committed to donating substantial amounts of the vaccines they have procured. Australia, with the capacity to produce a million doses of the highly transportable AstraZeneca vaccine every week, has a special responsibility here.
Eventually we will vaccinate everyone in Australia – we can just let those at-risk people in poorer countries get it before our healthy 30-year-olds here, as long as we’re able to keep the virus under control. We can vaccinate more Australians, even at short notice, if the country is hit by another Covid-19 wave.
Our strategy for an initially limited short-term rollout in Australia would still greatly reduce the chances of another bad outbreak here, plus mitigate the worst effects of one, even if much more spread occurred.
Australia has been very effective in controlling the spread of the virus, while still allowing us to continue with our high quality of living. By contrast, the virus is so widespread in many other countries that death rates and disruptions to life are immense.
Some might object that even though Australia is suffering much less than other countries, there are still huge personal and financial costs to keeping our international borders closed. While this is true, it is less relevant to the vaccination debate.
Even if we could vaccinate all Australians in the next few months, this would not allow us to open our borders any time soon, anyway. New arrivals to Australia would still be likely to be required to quarantine for two weeks. The ability to reopen our borders in the medium- to long-term depends on the success of the global vaccination project.
To keep these vaccines to ourselves when the benefits for so many of us are comparatively minor, while thousands are dying in other countries every day, would be ethically questionable.
Let’s protect those most at risk here with vaccines and continue our successful measures to stop the spread of Covid-19. But let’s also do what we can to help the rest of the world fight this virus.
• Dr Ben Bramble, from the school of philosophy at the Australian National University, is author of Pandemic Ethics; Dr Peter Collignon is an infectious diseases physician and microbiologist and a professor at the ANU medical school