For Australia’s media, we’re in the “three bears” lockdown: is it too hard, too soft, too hot, too cold? As a result, we’re trapped in a Freudian fixation on the narcissism of small differences in the latest round in the pandemic wars for attention.
Finely delineated policy options to make people stay home turn into existential threats as the debate lights up across divides old and new: left vs right, Twitter vs Facebook, News/Seven vs Nine/ABC, AstraZeneca vs Pfizer, Melbourne vs Sydney and, of course, WA vs the rest.
As premiers and senior health officials have taken on the job of news reporters, journalists have turned to “accountability” with a forensic drilling into the intricacies of the efficacy of state-by-state variations of stay-at-home orders.
Each premier sets aside an hour a day to answer over and over: why this? Why not that? Why now? Why not then? And each day, each premier takes the opportunity to advance their talking points with the same Goldilocks response: it’s “just right” (and on health advice, too!).
Sure, little things can make a difference — “for want of a nail, a shoe was lost” and all that. And maybe one premier or another is going to make a stumble that truly matters.
But all are operating within a narrow test-and-trace to stay-at-home continuum. State-by-state differences of speed and emphasis are a sign of a federation working well, not poorly. Sometimes, differences are a distraction.
While the media was gnawing away at fleeting interactions in small-scale retail (powered by the imagery of an apparently dangerously open Louis Vuitton store), the bigger story was disrupting transmission through interacting networks in extended families and enclosed workplaces in south-western Sydney.
The battle for attention rewards the certainty that catastrophism brings. Experts who bring “toughness” juxtaposed with the sure alternative of disaster are inherently more newsworthy than those talking with the fuzziness of “smarter lockdowns”.
Yet, the polling evidence suggests that in each state, voters trust what their particular government is doing. That’s the theory of rational ignorance in practice: sometimes you’re better off assuming the public health bureaucrats know more than you and trust that they know what they’re doing.
But each lockdown hurts, stripping states of voter confidence in how they’re managing the pandemic. The differences are more rhetorical, reflecting how the past 18 months’ experiences demand they message their audience: the Victorian government with a “there is no alternative” toughness; NSW with its hand-wringing caution; (and the federal government opts for its not-my-problem sniping.)
All states agree on one thing: it’s the bungled vaccine rollout that matters. That’s why Morrison is huddling largely off-screen while we talk about lockdown minutiae.
It matters more than we thought: Australia’s outbreak is an echo of a global crisis, as Delta outpaces worldwide vaccine take-up. As US President Biden said on the weekend, it’s now a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Umm, sounds like us.
Domestically, Australia’s journalists have been ahead of governments, like Norman Swan’s reporting on last year’s rejected Pfizer offer and Laura Tingle on the Rudd intervention. Journalists at The Guardian and The New Daily have worked the data to give important context.
International reporting shows that there’s more trouble coming: misinformation driving vaccine resistance, coupled with hesitancy and procrastination making the disease a continued drag on any return to normality.
The Australian government has resisted a target number to reopen, although Berejiklian has talked about 10 million doses in NSW and, on Insiders yesterday, Barnaby Joyce made a guesstimated target of 75% of Australia’s adult population. Trouble is, the right-now global example is that those figures are hard to reach.
In the US, Biden has called out Facebook for misinformation, accusing it of killing people, with just 12 sources producing two-thirds of anti-vax shares. (The platform’s defence was, well, “not all people”.) Others have pointed the finger at Murdoch-owned Fox News as a prime vector for anti-vax propaganda. Expect those talking points to pop up on Sky, sooner or later.
Meanwhile, as Australia is debating mandatory vaccination in health and aged care, France is tackling hesitancy head-on, requiring proof of vaccination or a recent negative test to enter cafes, restaurants, cinemas, high-speed trains or shopping malls. Expect that debate, too, to explode in Australia as doses become widely available and the vaccinated lose patience with future lockdowns to protect those slow on the uptake.
But so many other issues also matter.
Class war continues to have a strong influence on the approaches adopted:
(1). Exactly as with Operation Sovereign Borders, human need of ordinary people comes last; so creating surge capacity is ignored, as are the human costs of the gig economy, as is decent pay for quarantine staff, as are social measures such as dedicated quarantine facilities that would reduce spread while easing travel.
(2). At every opportunity, cost and risk is offloaded onto the individual, those least able to bear it. Yet pandemics dramatically increase inequality.
(3). Public money is used very deliberately to give the most to the least in need, especially to enrich corporate donors and supporters.
(4) In contrast to compensation for businesses, no visible lobbying for pay rises plus better conditions for public health system staff – the private health system having contributed nothing that was unsubsidised by the State.
Vaccine nationalism leading to the unequal allocation of COVID-19 vaccines could cost the global economy up to $1.2 trillion a year in GDP terms. Only 0.3% of vaccine supply is going to low-income countries. At the end of May ‘21, the U.S. had fully vaccinated half its adult population, while Chad hasn’t been able to administer a single dose. Covid19 could not hope for a better incubator.
First World nations looking out for themselves. Let the poorer nations struggle with inadequate infrastructure to have any hope for safety in this pandemic. Politicians may mouth platitudes re assistance but nothing of real value occurs.
Why do we not hear of other vaccines developed by “enemy/unfriendly” nations? How effective are they? Do they have newer ones against delta strain? Ah, good ol geopolitics at work so doubt anything beneficial will come through.
The world is in turmoil, getting worse, no vaccines for the majority, no plans for world wide relief – now more dying of hunger and other diseases.
Give the public a couple more lock downs and I’m positive the attitude will be “open up as usual” and just live with the results. The majority really does not care what is happening in most parts of the world.
Let’s vaccinate ourselves first, it’s a task which we are struggling with. It’s akin to fitting the oxygen mask on your face first in an aircraft mishap so that you can the help others. We should then be using our capacity to manufacture vaccines to provide for our poorer neighbours free or dirt cheap.
Wrong, it’s a task Morrison is struggling with.
”Kasy Chambers, Anglicare Australia executive director, accused the government of attempting to shift blame onto workers for the low rates of vaccinations, and said: “It is failures in the rollout that have caused low vaccination rates, not the actions of workers.
“Aged care workers were told that they were a priority group for vaccination. Instead of getting easy access to vaccines, they were left to navigate a messy and confusing rollout.”
The government had initially planned to vaccinate aged care workers in their own facilities. But it abandoned the plan, leaving workers reliant on leftover doses not used on residents.”
Scum Morrison outsourced the vaccination of private aged care residents and aged care workers to Aspen Medical, who are also major shareholders of the Coalition now privatised Medibank Private. Aspen Medical and their ‘in-reach’ (note the evangelical overtones of Scum) vaccination rollout has been a failure, just like their Mabel app designed to provide the wage thieving private aged care sector with aged care workers. All of Scum’s outsourcing has been at taxpayers expense, let alone the expense of those who now have covid.
Johnson Tory UK FREEDOM DAY A REAL WINNER
New cases among vaccinated people are set to outstrip cases among unvaccinated people within days according to the non-profit ZOE Covid study group.
Those who have been vaccinated may be less likely to die, but why the complacency about surging long Covid cases?
Boris Johnson’s “Do what I say, not what I do” freedom day won’t be remembered for Churchillian declarations, but for foolish boasting, toxic politics, and calamitous health policy misjudgement
How’s Freedom Day going for your fellow Tories in the UK?
Norman Swan: So with Britain, it’s very hard to find an epidemiologist in the UK who isn’t horrified by the opening up of the British economy and British system, the abandoning of masks. And the prediction is that within a relatively short space of time there will be 200,000 cases a day, and when you’ve got that number of cases, two things happen. One is that even with a high level of vaccination (which comes to Chris’s question) you’ve still got half the population who are vulnerable. While they quote figures over 60% fully immunised, that’s only of adults, it’s not of the whole population. Of the whole population, including children and adolescents, it’s about 50%. So 50% of the British population, tens of millions of people, are vulnerable to COVID-19, and it can run riot. That’s a lot of people with a new variant running as well. So what you are seeing is the beginning of another wave there.
Negative tests might not be enough: the Dutch recently allowed a music festival to go ahead with admittance only to negative-test result holders. There have subsequently been 1000 cases among attendees. With a large enough group, false-negative rates and enough cases in the population probably guarantee that sort of outcome.
It’ll be a while yet…
The man who was allowed to leave Australia for Argentina during the pandemic with his daughter joining him in February and her son- the man’s grandson at some stage, are all now infected and infecting South Australia. Morrison enabled their departure, and either Berjiklian’s leaky hotel rooms may have been the site of the man’s infection, or a NSW Delta infected hospital, or possibly the traveller caught it in Argentina where he had only one dose of the Russian sputnik vaccine.
What also matters are the drugs being developed to offer sufferers who have covid and again Morrisin is failing the nation in preference for Conman and his OECD job
”Associate Professor Steven Tong of the Doherty Institute heads the Australasian COVID-19 Trial (ASCOT), which is evaluating the treatments available for COVID.
“We’re struggling to get our vaccination rates up and even if we get them reasonably high there is still a reasonable likelihood that patients will get infected and will end up in hospital,” he said.
“So for those groups of people in the population, we still need treatment so we reduce their risk of getting very severe disease.
Even when 80 per cent of Australians are vaccinated, a significant proportion of the population will still be susceptible to the disease because they are resistant to the vaccine or choose not to be vaccinated.
However, he said a class of drugs called monoclonal antibodies had proved successful in treating COVID patients who had recently contracted the disease and were at their most infectious.
When asked whether the federal government should be moving to secure stocks of monoclonal antibody drugs, Dr Tong responded: “I would have thought that makes a lot of sense. I think the sooner we have these treatments available the better, and if we can expedite that process we should do everything in our power to do so.” ABC today.
And Scum only contacted the OECD countries and spend half a million in paying back the Conman numbers man who got him the PM for NSW gig. But nothing from Scovid for these drugs, just like pfizer
Did Crikey think this article was so good it was worth repeating on the same page? I disagree.
Scovid refuses point blank to shoulder the responsibilities for which he is paid: private aged care safety, quarantine, vaccine procurement and rollout.
He made over 50 phone calls to OECD officials on behalf of his numbers man and fellow conman Mathias Conman. Not one call to the CEO of pfizer, unlike other heads of governments. That was left up to Labor’s Kevin Rudd, who was requested by businessmen to try and get the pfizer vaccines already ordered brought forward due to the gold standard of bastardry practised by the NSW Coalition and federally when it came to gross negligence concerning covid protection for Australians. Rudd achieved what ScumScovid had no intention or interest in doing.
Scovid Morri$sinner spend millions and millions on his climate change denialist henchman, but didn’t spend a cent on quarantine nor on a vaccine other than the one his fellow Liberal hack Kiernan Schneemann was pushing.
The flights aboard a Royal Australian Air Force special purpose aircraft over the course of 34 days cost a total of $380,000, Guardian Australia can reveal after analysing the defence department’s quietly released flight records.
The full cost to the Australian government of the lobbying effort is likely to have been much higher, given that these expenses relate only to the flights and not accommodation. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade also set up a campaign taskforce of 8.5 full-time-equivalent staff to support Cormann’s candidacy. The effort would have also involved diplomats at Australia’s embassies and high commissions.
The RAAF plane flew to Turkey, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Slovenia, Luxembourg, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Hungary and France,….where formal interviews were done with candidates for secretary general.
Scovid ”argued that the RAAF jet was needed because Covid was “running rampant in Europe”.
“I mean, if Mathias was flying around on commercial planes, he would have got Covid,” Morrison said.
No hotel room for the Liberal Conmann, the Conmann: ”quarantined in a Western Australian police-approved residence, from which he continued to make campaign-related calls.”
Morrison and the foreign affairs minister, Marise Payne, also made calls to dozens of their counterparts to reinforce Cormann’s campaign to lead the Paris-based organisation, which gives advice to developed nations on economic trends, taxation, inequality, trade and fighting corruption….The Guardian.
”Anglicare Australia say its aged care workers are eager to be vaccinated but are being hampered by failures with the government’s “messy and confusing” rollout.
Aged care workers have been given until 17 September to receive a first dose or face being locked out of work.
As of last week, only about 40% of the workforce had received a first dose.
Both industry and staff unions have warned the [Morri$$inner] government the most significant barrier for aged care staff continues to be the lack of vaccination teams visiting staff in their workplaces.”
But Berjiklian approached Qantas and arranged for all its workforce including those in back room offices to get the jab, pfizer too. Never though did Berjiklian ensure drivers of infected airline crews were vaccinated nor did she mandate mask wearing for them. She is criminally grossly negligent and has caused the deaths and long term disease and suffering of Australians all over the nation as this spreads. At the same time Berjiklian had busloads of St Josephs Hunter Hill get their jab.
She stood up in front of the nation and the world and arrogantly said she didn’t regret any of her actions.