1/ BE AMAZED! Come with me on a little journey into the bizarre. We are going to explore the Western Australian government's new "Don't Assume You're Immune" campaign to raise awareness of vaccination and see how long it takes to find a mention of COVID-19.
2/ Things start off promisingly enough with this email to all WA Health employees from the WA Director General of Health, an infectious disease physician. It says the campaign is in response to "inaccurate and false information regarding public health measures". OK, fair enough.
3/ Further down the email, we hear how passionate Dr Bowen is about helping people take action to keep safe and encouraging us to keep up to date with our immunisations. Here, we find two links to the new immunisation website.
This is looking promising, isn't it?
4/ We click through to the new immunisation website. There, our hearts beating furiously in our chests, we click on the link which takes us to "Diseases that vaccines protect us against".
Things are still going well!
immunisation.health.wa.gov.au
5/ But, lo! When we click on the link to the page of "Diseases that vaccines protect us against", we do not find COVID-19. We look for him here. We look for him there. But we do not find him anywhere! 🤷
immunisation.health.wa.gov.au/diseases-vacci…
6/ Resourceful fellows that we are, however, we are not dismayed, and we go to the menu at the top right and click on that, which takes us to another menu page.
Here, we click on the menu item "Immunisation programs and schedules". Seems sensible, yes?
immunisation.health.wa.gov.au/diseases-vacci…
7/ This takes us to another page, which looks like this. We scratch our heads and scroll down...
8/ ... which brings us to this. We click on 'Adult immunisation schedule', for here, surely we will find the information we seek about COVID-19 immunisation? Surely!
9/ But no! Now, despite ourselves, we are becoming dismayed. For we do not find any mention of COVID-19 in the Adult immunisation schedule.
healthywa.wa.gov.au/Articles/A_E/A…
10/ Not even when we scroll right to...
11/ ... the bottom of the page!
12/ Gathering ourselves, we scroll back up to the top of the page and accept the option to "Read more about immunisations at the Australian Department of Health website (external site)."
13/ Here, at last, we will surely find the information we seek about COVID-19 vaccination!
And yes, even though this link takes us rather oddly to an 'Immunisation for adolescents' page, a flicker of hope arises as we spot the opportunity to click on a COVID-19 vaccination page
14/ Click on it we do, and find ourselves on an 'Immunisation resources' page with entries posted by date. Nothing here is specific to COVID-19, but we start scrolling
...and scrolling
...and scrolling
15/ ...and scrolling. Until, on the TWENTY FIFTH ITEM, we possibly find what we are looking for, in the form of the opportunity to download a pdf of an infographic on 'When to get your COVID vaccination'.
16/ With trembling hands, we click on the link, open the pdf file with Adobe Acrobat and THERE IT IS!
17/ I don't even think this is deliberate, because that would require an absurd level of conspiracy. I think this is the expression of a collective denial, a need to forget, to negate the very existence of this beast which threatened to rob us completely of the status quo.
18/ As COVID-19 continues to ravage the world in so many ways, causing suffering, death and chaos, I don't really know how to respond. It is all so very odd.🤷♂️
19/ Oh yes, and I forgot. Try searching for 'COVID' on the new immunisation website and this is what you get:
"Search results for 'covid'
We found 0 results that matched your search"
20/ And if we search on 'COVID-19', we get one result, which, if we click on it, it takes us back to...
21/ ...tweet number 7 in this thread, where we re-enter the useless loop of oblivion.
22/ As ever, the absurdity of life cannot be better expressed than it is in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
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