Australians alarmed as gains unravel
Australia, hailed as a success story last year in COVID-19 containment, is finding its hard-won gains may come undone after a spike in infections.
The country escaped the worst of the pandemic due to efficient measures to prevent the spread of the virus.
But in the past few weeks, there has been a fresh spate of infections. The fact that it also involves the highly contagious Delta variant of the virus has prompted alarm across the country.
State borders are again closed, with major cities under lockdown and millions of people under stay-athome orders amid dozens of new cases a day. Compounding the concerns is that less than 5 percent of the population are fully vaccinated. Against this backdrop, many people are starting to ask: what went wrong?
Conservative Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who faces an election within the next 12 months, is facing questions over the slow pace of mass vaccinations, with opposition political figures and some independent experts saying his handling of the rollout has been less than spectacular.
Opposition leader Anthony Albanese, of the Labor Party, best summed up the situation recently when he said: “At the start of the year the prime minister had just two things to do — vaccinate the population and to make sure we had quarantine facilities up and running for returning travelers. In both he has failed miserably.”
Vaccine shortages
Since Australia began its vaccination program on Feb 22, it has been plagued with shortages of vaccines, mismanagement and muddled vaccination messaging, as well as reluctance on the part of many people to take the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Despite the vaccination hype, the rollout has fallen short of expectations. Any hope of having most of the population fully vaccinated by October has been dashed.
With supply shortages has come a “blame game” between the federal government and the states, especially now as the deadly Delta variant of the coronavirus has taken hold in many states, forcing lockdowns.
Terry Nolan, head of the Vaccine and Immunisation Research Group at the Doherty Institute in Melbourne, said the slow pace of the rollout risked damaging public confidence.
Hassan Vally, an epidemiologist and senior lecturer at La Trobe University in Melbourne, said it is easy in hindsight to criticize.
“The government started well enough,” he said. “It ordered two or three times more vaccines than was needed. But then we had the Queensland University/CSL vaccine failure in December last year, Pfizer cutting the number of doses to Australia and the AstraZeneca bloodclotting issue.”
In December, the University of Queensland and biotech company CSL announced that they were abandoning joint clinical trials of a COVID-19 vaccine as trial participants returned false positive HIV test results. As for AstraZeneca, Vally was referring to reports that emerged earlier this year of some recipients of the drugmaker’s vaccine developing a blood-clotting disorder.