Hacker News Reader

Comment by nojs | Hacker News Reader

Your comment is slightly out of date. The stated position of both the Australian PM and NSW state premier is that elimination is impossible, and vaccination/reopening is the goal.

https://www.9news.com.au/national/coronavirus-update-we-cant...

View on HN

If that's correct then why have they been so slow to distribute vaccines?

Incompetent governance.

Because the federal government is full of incompetent conservative fuckwits that couldn't organise a root in a brothel and would struggle to win 5% of the vote without decades of the worst Murdoch propaganda behind them that makes Fox News look reasonable.

We have one of the worst governments in the entire democratic world. We just got insanely lucky that at the start of the pandemic they decided to lay off as much responsibility as possible to the state governments who have mostly been fantastic.

This got downvoted for the emotional language, but the facts of the matter are sadly correct.

I recognise you may not have the backstory on why this is the case.

Australia relied mainly on AstraZeneca and the UQ molecular clamping vaccine for its vaccine strategy, both of which could be manufactured locally. It signed other contracts for vaccines lackadaisically and with a late delivery time.

AstraZeneca is less effective than mRNA vaccines like Pfizer and Moderna, and causes a rare blood clotting condition that's fatal at a rate of 1 per millions. The UQ molecular clamping vaccine failed clinical trials despite being effective because it caused some patients to return a false positive result for HIV. This meant that domestic vaccine production in Australia was limited to one less effective vaccine that sometimes (very rarely) kills the people who get it, which the media have had a field day with.

The government now faces the problem of having millions of doses of a vaccine that few people want, few doses of the vaccines everyone wants, drug manufacturers who've already signed agreements with everyone else, a low rate of infection (due to lockdowns) that means they don't deserve emergency support, and a population that has no idea what's happening because the situation is complicated.

On top of this, the government has made some bad decisions with the roll-out itself. It doesn't allow the age groups most vulnerable to COVID-19 to receive the marginally safer and significantly more effective mRNA vaccines, on the basis that this age group has a clear benefit from receiving AstraZeneca and a lower risk of blood clotting, so there's significant vaccine hesitancy and less effective vaccine coverage among the very group who's most likely to die from the disease. It also didn't allow young people to receive the AstraZeneca vaccine for a long time, and even now requires them to give informed consent to a doctor or pharmacist before receiving it, so the roll-out requires finding qualified doctors and pharmacists as well as nurses, at a time when the medical system is already strained.

Can't you buy other vaccines?

I live in slovenia, and we're giving vaccines away to other countries (literally), because people don't want to get vaccinated, and the vaccines are nearing the expiry date.

You can choose the vaccine, and can get vaccinated any day, even without signing up.

Yes, that's the obvious solution, and in fact we've bought Pfizer from Poland and cut various other deals. It's unfortunately not quick to do, although in my opinion the government failed to prioritise it as heavily as it should have.

Interesting to see that vaccine idiocy has made it to other countries. American soft power truly is something.

Interesting you think it’s American soft power when it might as well be Russian soft power that is making it to the U.S. south.

For elderly patients at least the risk of HIV infection is minimal so I don't understand why a false positive HIV test would cause a clinical trial to fail. Some cancer therapies also cause false positive HIV tests and that doesn't prevent them being used.

That’s the story of how it started.

Australia is a rich country, once this happened they could have paid whatever it takes to get enough Pfeizer/Moderna. The price almost don’t matter, it is so cost effective it’s insane.

If we could figure out the total cost of this pandemic I’m sure all the vaccines we will take over many years will be a fraction of 1% of the total cost and that is not including human suffering and death.

Yep. It costs somewhere on the order of $100 million to $1 billion a week to keep Sydney or Melbourne in lockdown. The costs thus far have vastly exceeded the estimated cost of ordering mRNA vaccine doses for every adult in the country ($780m[0]) or building federal quarantine facilities that don't leak cases (around $200m for a 500 bed facility[1]). It's an astounding leadership failure.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/10/stuffed-how-au...

[1] https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/deal-in-sight-for-20..., and though I have doubts about whether it should cost $400k a bed to build and operate a quarantine facility, it would still be much cheaper than locking down the entire state

So their initial strategy turned out impossible to follow, but now they have a new one you trust?

Did they refund the fines of those people who protested or are people still fined and arrested?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com