A freedom of information request has revealed what we knew in our hearts all along: we are where we are with COVID-19 right now because of a shambolic political turn of events.
In June 2020 Pfizer offered to meet the Morrison government about supplying its cutting-edge mRNA vaccine to Australia. It said it was “able to make senior members of Pfizer’s global leadership team available for this discussion, particularly if the minister and/or departmental leadership can be involved”.
We now know that the minister declined to meet Pfizer’s top brass and while mid-level officials haggled over a confidentiality agreement, the United States and United Kingdom cut deals with it.
Anyone who’s spent much time in business knows that if you want somebody to tell you potentially very valuable information, you’re going to have to give them some assurance that you’re not going to steal it. And anyone who’s negotiated such agreements knows there’s almost always a reasonable path through. In any case, other countries managed to figure it out. Are we really just not as competent at the basics of governing as Boris Johnson’s UK or Donald Trump’s America?
On Wednesday Prime Minister Scott Morrison defended Health Minister Greg Hunt, saying: “Of course there’ll be critics in the middle of a crisis and lots of hindsight heroes and others who say: ‘This could have been done or that could have been done.’ ”
It’s not hindsight heroes who are the problem here. It’s the foresight failures of this government when it came to vaccines.
Morrison and Hunt have pushed the line that nobody knew that mRNA vaccines (such as Pfizer and Moderna) were going to turn out to be awesome, so how can they be blamed for going slow and not buying enough doses early enough?
That nobody knew is the whole point. Nobody knew that Pfizer and Moderna were going to work. Nobody knew that AstraZeneca was going to work. Nobody knew that some vaccines would lead to rare but deadly blood clots, others would wane in protection against infection after six months, and another would lead to false positives for HIV.
When the future is uncertain, it’s wise to hedge your bets — that’s what ordinary people do every day. Try skimping on car insurance, getting into an accident, and then telling your spouse they are a hindsight hero. Or a financial adviser telling you to put your entire retirement savings in just two stocks because it’s hard to say what’s going to happen to all 200 individual companies in the ASX200. There’s a word for that: malpractice.
Morrison is right about one thing, however: it’s time to focus on the future. And this leads me to two very simple questions.
First: in future will our government continue to make the same rookie mistakes it made last year? The almost pathological incapability of certain politicians to admit error makes it all too likely they will commit them again. Maybe there’s all kinds of sombre introspection going on in certain circles, and they’re just mounting a strong public defence. Or maybe they really think they didn’t make mistakes, and that all this accountability stuff is rather annoying.
Second question: what level of incompetence from a minister is required for them to lose their portfolio? We’ll never know exactly how big the cost of Australia’s bungled vaccine purchasing strategy and vaccine rollout execution is, but any reasonable estimate has to be north of $10 billion. If that’s not enough for someone to get the boot, what is? $100 billion?
One lesson we teach schoolchildren is the importance of taking responsibility for one’s actions. We tell them it’s important to say “I messed up. I’m sorry. Here’s what I’m doing to fix it.” If we demand this kind of acknowledgment from kids, should we demand anything less of our national leaders?
I don’t see a futre of better decisions, because the cabinet are incompetent. given that there were two very different vaccine ideas, surely you would go 2 bob each way. Not Scummo though. No hose, no syringe, no responsibility, no go.
I think you could say that Smirko the evil clown “Doesn’t do responsibility”.
Amongst many things he doesn’t do like the right thing.
I call him THE “EVIL” PENTECOSTAL. He has a lot to answer for.
Hunt is an abject grovelling lying failure as is all of those in his party and those in NSW Coalition as well, it’s a shocking fact to acknowledge but the FOI results are backing up what the CEO of Pfizer and others have said.
The unvarnished total truth is that Australians had an opportunity to never experience this horror.
https://insidestory.org.au/a-little-jab-now-and-then/
How and why Australians have been killed, are being killed and will have lasting side effects from covid, there is only one reason and it’s the Coalition, can’t be denied no matter how much they lie. We could have all been vaccinated by February2021 but for Morrison and his Coalition and the relentless Coalition destruction of a once fantastic public service.
The Inside Story article is to be read with this one and the enormity of the crime perpetrated by Morrison on Australians for personal gain is exposed.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/12/in-hindsight-there-was-no-foresight-how-australia-bungled-its-pfizer-covid-deal
Attack and defend strategies, just like in uni. Never got any further than that.
i just shake my head in disbelief every time I see this ritual on tv. Morrison got the mute button early on, I swap channels now every time a politician is on.
This country is in need of competent people and none are in parliament.
I worked as a glassware cleaner in a university medical lab in the late 1990s while studying my History Degree.
From the conversation back then, I knew mRNA was going to be the way of the future. Any good advisor to government would have been able to give the Commonwealth the good oil on Pfizer and Moderna.
Unfortunately, the Liberal government has surrounded itself with yes men to avoid scrutiny and leaks and has done so since the Howard years. The gravy train is made up of individuals and companies who rely on the government for their income. Many scientists, and advisors, unfortunately, do not have an income if they stand up to their benefactors both in government and big business supporters
The PMs big problem is he believes he is the chosen one and his decisions are infallible hence his first decision is usually his only decision. Boris and Donald chose a number of options including a Pfizer order. Even Poland and Singapore had looked at and ordered Pfizer as an option and we are the benificiary of their judgment without which we would not have these nearly out of date left overs ,where would we be today without these left overs?
And now we find the prime minister for Sydney and his no lockdown assistant are ceasing all reporting to the public in the way of daily updates to hide their incompetence . Some democracy .We need a royal commission and a national crimes commission to scrutinise all decisions made by this incompetent corupt pair of hacks. The total arrogance of this pair is unbelievable and will be studied by students of politics for years to come
If Gladys wants to vacate the field, Labor should step into the vacuum and feed the Media Beast.
I agree 100% and see no reason why this could not occur This behavior must stop
I can think of several reasons why it won’t occur – laziness, lack of enterprise, vision, purpose, courage, intelligence and giving a flying.
Opposition is the best sinecure of all – no effort required and muchhigher pay than the useless drones could ever dream of “earning” (an alien concept) in the working world of reality.
I have had dealings with media releases on behalf of Labor in the past, feeding the media beast is a very difficult task given who the beasts are and to whom they are beholden. Might sound possible but it isn’t.
Scottie from marketing only got his begging bowl out when he realized that he needed to keep November viable for an election, as the iron ore prices are dropping and so our economy is likely to be in a real recession by May 2022.
Smirko the evil clown, cynically thinks that the “Good News Bulletins” regarding vaccination rates will be able to drown out the general population’s thoughts of “What do you mean, the Health Minister sent a health department bureaucrat to meet the international head of Pfizer” and then didn’t order our vaccines until after the US and UK And France and most of Scandinavia.
The one thing which sticks in the craw of everyone is being lied to!
“We are at the front of the line”, saith Scottie from marketing
What line?.
Those doses he bought from Poland were supposed to go to Africa under the Covax agreement.
Boris came good for a few million doses, which we will need to repay in December, leaving bugger all for boosters for our frontline staff. Singapore will also need to be paid back.
Robbing Peter to pay Paul.
All of this demonstrates that the only thing that this government can do with any efficiency is give away our hard earned tax money to multi-nationals which do not pay tax.
Thirteen gorillas test positive for Covid at Atlanta zooWestern lowland gorillas are believed to have caught the virus from a zookeeper
Overpopulation by our species of this planet and the destruction of other species environments and ecosystems combined with the illegal transnational wildlife trade that caters to the Chinese medicine adherents and those who like to brag they’ve eaten a pangolin obtained from a wet Chinese market are to blame for this. The majority of the transnational illegal wildlife trade ends up in Vietnam and China. And to get any trade entering china you have to have the right “connections”.
All of your points are very valid and the sheer social climbing rubbish which is involved in the eating of pangolins an endangered species by the middle class of the supposedly classless communist China is bad enough.
The consumption of live horseshoe nosed bats which are the size of a butterfly is as nauseating as it is disgusting.
China has trouble coming to terms with the fact that it is their ruling class which is sabotaging the chances of having a respectable place on the world stage.
Firstly by allowing the corona virus contact from the bat’s nose transfer allowing a minor mutation to change it into a human infective virus and then by trying to conceal its origins and the scale of the outbreak.
The fact that Li Wenliang was jailed for causing disharmony and spreading rumours by describing this new infection in a closed chat room with his colleagues, speaks volumes for the Chinese society. Dr Li Wenliang supposedly died from Covid19 after having been starved and punished in the jail system in China.
Morrison was so focused on a PR coup for His Oz vaccine manufacturers that he didn’t care about the effects of Covid or the need for other vaccines.
Just as now he’s more focused on trying to deflect responsibility….