Australia's covid problem

[Lootman]

At the same time, I am very pleasantly surprised how well the UK government (that I hold in the lowest esteem) has coped with rolling out vaccinations.

The UK govt had nothing to do with rolling out vaccinations it was done by the NHS.

Pfft. The NHS is owned, run and managed by the government. It is a government run service (or business, depending on how you look at it).

If you are going to criticize the UK government for doing something wrong on Covid, then you have to give it credit when it does something right, e.g. the vaccinations. The buck stops there.

So maybe the UK got the restrictions wrong and the vaccinations right. Australia got the restrictions right and the vaccinations wrong.

[servodude]

The UK govt had nothing to do with rolling out vaccinations it was done by the NHS.

Pfft. The NHS is owned, run and managed by the government. It is a government run service (or business, depending on how you look at it).

If you are going to criticize the UK government for doing something wrong on Covid, then you have to give it credit when it does something right, e.g. the vaccinations. The buck stops there.

So maybe the UK got the restrictions wrong and the vaccinations right. Australia got the restrictions right and the vaccinations wrong.

You know, from my experience, I would say that's a good way of putting it.

I am surprised in way about the vaccine issues down there. Myself, I found the Australian health service at a coal face level was extremely good. Far, far better organised and proactive than the NHS has ever been for me. Justified or not, the NHS staff have always given me the impression I am a nuisance rather than a patient seeking health care. Whereas in my time living in West Australia, the emphasis was very much on my best interests. Just my experience.

RVF

You can blame the twunts with minimal maths ability that spread [expletive deleted] about the AZ vaccine for the roll out there hitting a brick wall
- dangerous dunces
They should just get back to " feeding the ducks" while watching GBNews or the Handmaid's Tale - but perhaps there's not enough Viagra for that in the UK these days?!

-sd
Edit: that was a bit too Anglia Saxon - so fixed it, cheers

[Lootman]

Pfft. The NHS is owned, run and managed by the government. It is a government run service (or business, depending on how you look at it).

If you are going to criticize the UK government for doing something wrong on Covid, then you have to give it credit when it does something right, e.g. the vaccinations. The buck stops there.

So maybe the UK got the restrictions wrong and the vaccinations right. Australia got the restrictions right and the vaccinations wrong.

You know, from my experience, I would say that's a good way of putting it.

I am surprised in way about the vaccine issues down there. Myself, I found the Australian health service at a coal face level was extremely good. Far, far better organised and proactive than the NHS has ever been for me. Justified or not, the NHS staff have always given me the impression I am a nuisance rather than a patient seeking health care. Whereas in my time living in West Australia, the emphasis was very much on my best interests. Just my experience.

You can blame the twunts with minimal maths ability that spread Manure about the AZ vaccine for the roll out there hitting a brick wall
- dangerous dunces
They should just get back to " feeding the ducks" while watching GBNews or the Handmaid's Tale - but perhaps there's not enough Viagra for that in the UK these days?!

That is some anger you have there. But is your big theory here that Australia stopped its vaccine rollout because the Brits were putting down their own vaccine?

I think you need to blame the Aussies for that. In the UK there is actually a fair amount of patriotic jingoism for the AZN vaccine, perhaps more than justified but it is there nonetheless.

[servodude]

You can blame the twunts with minimal maths ability that spread Manure about the AZ vaccine for the roll out there hitting a brick wall
- dangerous dunces
They should just get back to " feeding the ducks" while watching GBNews or the Handmaid's Tale - but perhaps there's not enough Viagra for that in the UK these days?!

That is some anger you have there. But is your big theory here that Australia stopped its vaccine rollout because the Brits were putting down their own vaccine?

I think you need to blame the Aussies for that. In the UK there is actually a fair amount of patriotic jingoism for the AZN vaccine, perhaps more than justified but it is there nonetheless.

Funny thing, I recall that the very earliest batches of the AZ vaccine were in fact made in Melbourne.

RVF

They were making over a million doses a week in Melbourne last time I looked
Just no one wants them locally; blame bad press and aerosols spreading gossip
So they're exported to PNG etc
I'd have had one but they'd rather give me Pfizer

- sd

[Lootman]

That is some anger you have there. But is your big theory here that Australia stopped its vaccine rollout because the Brits were putting down their own vaccine?

I think you need to blame the Aussies for that. In the UK there is actually a fair amount of patriotic jingoism for the AZN vaccine, perhaps more than justified but it is there nonetheless.

Funny thing, I recall that the very earliest batches of the AZ vaccine were in fact made in Melbourne.

They were making over a million doses a week in Melbourne last time I looked. Just no one wants them locally; blame bad press and aerosols spreading gossip . So they're exported to PNG etc.

So perhaps the problem was that Australia bet the farm on just one vaccine and then, when that vaccine took a hit, there was no substitutue.

That is always the risk with any single vaccine, especially as these were all developed very quickly and approved for emergency use only. And it is not as if Australia is the only country that decided it had issues with AZN. The US FDA still hasn't approved it and various parts of the EU held back on using it universally.

[Julian]

…
So maybe the UK got the restrictions wrong and the vaccinations right. Australia got the restrictions right and the vaccinations wrong.

Maybe. Or maybe Australia didn’t even get the vaccinations wrong. Maybe it had a perfectly coherent and workable plan to not join the expensive stampede for masses of early doses instead intending to buy when supply was more plentiful on the basis that its hotel quarantine border defences plus very aggressive contact tracing would keep the virus out of the community for long enough for them to get to full (as possible) vaccine protection for the population. That strategy might have ended up delivering an enviable final outcome for Australia - domestic life as normal for most of the pandemic, able to open borders maybe at the end of the year once the vaccination target had been met, and coming out of it all with far less additional national debt than many other countries due to far less business support needed (furlough etc) and no huge sums put on the table for speculative vaccine development. Unfortunately for Australia though it looks as if, while the non-pharmaceutical defences seemed to be keeping all the variants at bay until now, this new Delta variant looks as if it has broken through due to its significantly higher infectiousness. If it wasn’t for that I think the narrative about Australia might be very different right now.

- Julian

[Julian]

From a recent documentary, Australia was close to developing their own vaccine, but apparantly they used an inactivated HIV protein as one of the key components. I dont think that went down to well.

Yes, I posted the iPlayer link to that documentary on the previous page of this thread.

- Julian

[murraypaul]

Maybe. Or maybe Australia didn’t even get the vaccinations wrong. Maybe it had a perfectly coherent and workable plan to not join the expensive stampede for masses of early doses instead intending to buy when supply was more plentiful

But that wasn't the plan.

August 2020:
https://www.pm.gov.au/media/new-deal-se ... australian

Australians will be among the first in the world to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, if it proves successful, through an agreement between the Australian Government and UK-based drug company AstraZeneca.

Under the deal, every single Australian will be able to receive the University of Oxford COVID-19 vaccine for free, should trials prove successful, safe and effective.

[Julian]

Maybe. Or maybe Australia didn’t even get the vaccinations wrong. Maybe it had a perfectly coherent and workable plan to not join the expensive stampede for masses of early doses instead intending to buy when supply was more plentiful

But that wasn't the plan.

August 2020:
https://www.pm.gov.au/media/new-deal-se ... australian

Australians will be among the first in the world to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, if it proves successful, through an agreement between the Australian Government and UK-based drug company AstraZeneca.

Under the deal, every single Australian will be able to receive the University of Oxford COVID-19 vaccine for free, should trials prove successful, safe and effective.

Fair enough. Thanks, I haven't been following Australia that closely until fairly recently. So Australia did in fact join the stampede for early doses and subsequently everything got derailed by all the AZ confusion and presumably also the failure of the Australian molecular clamp vaccine leaving it too dependent on highly contested Pfizer supplies.

Australia might still get away with it though if in the next few weeks it can contact trace the Delta variant out of existence as far as community transmission is concerned and learn sufficient lessons from the outbreaks to close the leaks in the border quarantine procedures so that it is effective against the Delta variant. That could buy enough time for even the slow pace of the vaccine roll out there to reach as much of the population as possible, vaccine hesitancy notwithstanding, but at the expense of more time with extremely severe international travel restrictions in place. The trouble is that this Delta variant does seem so infectious that I fear the contact tracers won't be able to catch up with it even with the lockdowns in place. We'll find out in the next few weeks I suppose.

- Julian

[9873210]

Australia might still get away with it though if in the next few weeks it can contact trace the Delta variant out of existence as far as community transmission is concerned

Despite the slow uptake Australia has given one shot to 24% of the population and fully vaccinated 5.9%. While that's far from ideal it should be enough to protect the most vulnerable and some essential workers. How different would things have been if UK had had that degree of protection last November?

Even if delta escapes immediately it is unlikely Australia will fare as badly as the UK, US, or EU when they write the history of this pandemic. Could they do better? Probably, but we have many examples of how they could have done worse.

There is significant overlap between the "COVID is a bad cold for the young" and "Australia must vaccinate everybody or somebody will all die, which would be a complete failure" brigades. Also note that Australia has replaced Taiwan as the object lesson of how awful it is to have an effective response to a pandemic.

[Lootman]

Australia has replaced Taiwan as the object lesson of how awful it is to have an effective response to a pandemic.

It was really New Zealand and Taiwan that self-styled themselves as the poster children for how to handle Covid.

I never bought it for either of them. NZ is too ridiculously remote to be relevant to most normal places, whilst the Taiwan populace are too easily manipulated and controlled to be instructive to a more independently-minded western country.

Australia was never doing as well as those even before the recent errors. But I guess judgement ultimately comes down to whether you assess performance solely by the virus stats, or whether you consider other factors such as civil rights and freedoms.

[Dod101]

At the same time, I am very pleasantly surprised how well the UK government (that I hold in the lowest esteem) has coped with rolling out vaccinations.

The UK govt had nothing to do with rolling out vaccinations it was done by the NHS.

The Test and trace system (so called "NHS" Test and Trace) has nothing to do with the NHS and is run by the DHSS (The Govt) through private contracts.

And who is it that runs the NHS and ordered the vaccines?

Dod

[Lanark]

And who is it that runs the NHS and ordered the vaccines?

Dod

The NHS are managed by a series of independent trusts, those are overseen by NHS England who provide centralised advice about what the individual trusts should be doing. (n.b. The trusts can and often do ignore a lot of it.)

NHS Supply Chain manages the sourcing, delivery and supply of healthcare products for NHS trusts and healthcare organisations across England and Wales.

The funding for all of that is via the Department of Health and Social Care, the DHSC do oversee NHS England but they have surprisingly little sway in the day to day running of anything lower down the food chain. Some people think this is a bad thing and would prefer it if accountants in whitehall were deciding which operations are worthwhile to perform.

[Dod101]

Well I do not believe that the UK Govt had nothing to do with the rolling out of the vaccine, or at least there would have been no vaccine to roll out if it were not for the UK Govt if you prefer to think of it that way.

Dod