Thread by @GrayConnolly

As it is June 30, and the Australian financial year ends, as does "month 18 of 2020", and Sydney and other large cities are locked down, it is time for all of us Australians to review the simply abysmal Vaccine procurement and roll-out. Here we go ....

As JFK said, victory has a thousand fathers and defeat is an orphan. But this failure has many parents as well. I started my own Vaccine (non) Rollout thread on Jan 4, when we ivo Sydney's northern beaches were locked down. No one cared....

https://twitter.com/GrayConnolly/status/1345920720736436226

On Jan 4, it was plainly obvious that the Australian vaccine rollout was headed to our current dead-end. No one in January could explain the step-by-step of how a pallet of Pfizer landing at Sydney Airport tonight would end up in an arm in Adelaide. This was a logistical task.

Read the thread 👆 It is not like developments in Vaccine design, testing, and production, were any secret. I followed, for example, @Alicia_Smith19 & others, who, daily, gave anyone interested the progress of Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, etal, in the Vaccine race.

So here we are, on the eve of July 1, and a pitifully small number of Australians have one dose let alone both doses of either Pfizer or AZ. Much of the country is locked down. Worse, we are no closer to the Herd Immunity that will protect the most vulnerable in our Herd.

I will not deal with the Vaccine hesitancy issue. We have locked down most big cities to protect the elderly. Our only way out is Vaccination. It is an absolute disgrace that State Govts & their Health apparatchiks have undermined confidence in Vaccine safety & efficacy.

Apart from the Federal failure to procure enough Vaccines, there is the States' failure to organise Vaccination hubs at scale. Sydney, for example, has empty football stadia & ovals (near road/rail links) that would be ideal places to build Vaccination hubs. There is no urgency.

Nonetheless, here we are. For those of us Australians who live in greater Sydney (population ~6m), we are locked down and, also, many of us are trying to book a vaccination ... which would help us achieve Herd Immunity and avoid future lockdowns. There should be a war footing….

The Sydney Olympic Park - site of the 2000 Olympics - is a Vaccination hub. But given that Sydney is locked down & the virus is contagious, why does this 'hub' shut at 7pm? It routinely hosts football into the late night. Why is it not providing jabs 24/7? Where is the urgency?

Next up, St Vincent's Darlinghurst. It is great to have a Vaccination hub so close to the CBD. It is a short bus or taxi ride for many workers. Yet, in this 'crisis', it ends vacciantions at 4:15pm. Again, given young & mobile populations around Darlinghurst, why not later? 24/7?

Next up, Royal North Shore - great hospital, just near St Leonards station. The north shore is underserved by Vaccination hubs & has an older population (and/or who are CBD workers). So why does this northside vaccination clinic close at 3:30pm? Who thought this was a good idea?

So even if you are not from Sydney, you get the idea: no one at State or Federal level thought through the basic logistics question of how, again, does a pallet of Pfizer landing at Sydney Airport tonight end up in an arm in Adelaide (or anywhere else) in the next few hours/days?

As I said, I tried, while locked down ivo Sydney's northern beaches in January, to get people I knew/know 'in real life' in politics & media to be interested in the vaccine procurement and distribution issue. I failed. But I mention this as this debacle was always in plain sight

In many respects the final insult was delivered today. Apparently there were proposals to use our football stadia & ovals as vaccine hubs, as well as Pharmacies that already deliver flu jabs, to also deliver the Pfizer and AZ jabs, so the roll-out would be, truly, national.

Again, vaccinations are logistics. Using football grounds and ovals made enormous sense for Australia's cities, suburbs & regions, as you can have people socially distance, register & enter at point A, progress for jabs through B and C, and then exit at D etc. Militaries do this.

But instead of Australia using this mass vaccination hub model, as the US & UK have done, we somehow have been diverted to a model based on GPs - not just causing immense delay but also privileging Doctors over Pharmacies & esp over those of us Normals trying to get vaccinated.

If there has been one upside to Covid & this, so far, distinctly Australian vaccination debacle, it has been, to borrow the Biblical metaphor, to bring us all into the light & so we can see people and things as they truly are. Bear with me.

We have had graphic, clear, irrefutable evidence of how well the Covid Vaccines work - they work, here, flawlessly. For example, the only people who did not contract Delta variant at a super-spreader party were vaccinated health workers.

abc.net.au/news/2021-06-2…

Despite this and other examples of the Vaccines clearly working for the common good, we have had the most bizarre 'coalition of the fringes', continue to cast doubts on the Vaccines' safety & efficacy. Even State health officers who must know better. Everyone knows this is wrong.

So, ultimately, the questions of Covid are not just logistics, but of what you value? Do you want to reward paranoia? Grifters? Political hackery? Or do you want to protect & conserve your herd? Especially the weakest in the herd? Who may, in time, be you or someone you love?

I fired my salvos/said my piece on @ABCthedrum re everyone getting vaccinated. Getting vaccinated is good for you but even better for the Herd, esp the weakest in the Herd. Nations are team efforts, nations are herds & not everything is about you #TheDrum

https://twitter.com/ABCthedrum/status/1366686785615532039

There is a symmetry in the Vaccine debacle now having to be fixed by a General. When Australians go to War, we are known for our grit, for being well-organised & for looking after each other, ie the mateship 'that made us'. We, clearly, need that here, now more than ever. / Finis