Confronting delays in the COVID-19 vaccination program this week, federal Health Department secretary Brendan Murphy said: “We’re not like the US or UK.” He’s right, but not in the way he intended.
Murphy argues that because we don’t have scores of people dying, we can take our time with the vaccine rollout, “as quickly and carefully and safely as we can”. “It’s not a race,” he said.
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian receives the AstraZeneca vaccine at Sydney’s St George Hospital this week. Credit:Getty
If that thinking extends to a lack of ambition about the proportion of Australians we vaccinate, then at best we’ll squander a remarkable opportunity, and at worst risk another major outbreak and threaten the nation’s prolonged economic recovery. If it reflects any complacency about the urgency of the vaccination program, it is terribly dangerous.
As of yesterday, about 130,000 Australians – or one in 200 – had received a first-dose COVID-19 vaccine. And this week the government admitted it would not meet its November target to complete the vaccination program.
Countries with significant caseloads, such as Britain, the US and much of Europe, are vaccinating to save lives today rather than reach for so-called “herd immunity” – the point at which so many people have been vaccinated that another exponential outbreak can’t occur. Australia, by contrast, has a real chance to achieve herd immunity. Whether we do so will be determined by government policy.
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If anything, the government looks disappointingly unambitious. It risks committing perhaps the greatest public policy bungle in Australian history if it cannot rise to the procurement, logistics and planning challenges to guarantee rapid mass vaccination as soon as possible. After all its great work earlier in the pandemic, that is a terrible shame.
As UNSW Kirby Institute epidemiologists Raina MacIntyre, Valentina Costantino, and Mallory Trent have shown, the proportion of the population we need to vaccinate to achieve herd immunity varies substantially with vaccine efficacy. At 95 per cent efficacy, they calculate, 63 per cent of the population would need to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity. If efficacy is 70 per cent, it rises to 86 per cent of the population.
Australia has chosen to pin most of its hopes on the AstraZeneca vaccine, which has 72 per cent efficacy. We’ve only ordered enough of the Pfizer vaccine, with its higher efficacy of 95 per cent, to cover at most 40 per cent of the population, and that doesn’t account for potential wastage, spoilage, and overdosing, as we’ve already seen. Also, we’ve inexplicably ordered zero doses of the equally high-efficacy Moderna vaccine. With the mix of vaccines we look set to administer, we’ll need to vaccinate about three-quarters of our population.
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2021-03-12 01:23:13Z
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