With the current wave of COVID Delta variant raging on, the issue of vaccination has once again become the topic of discussion at a lot of press conferences.
As this topic of ‘To Vaccinate, Or Not To Vaccinate’ became the new Bard phrase of our century, the COVID virus has mutated during the fermentation of our discussion. So, how did we get here?
There is without a doubt that the Scott Morrison government has failed one of the most basic tasks that his government needed to do – to secure enough vaccines for the population. The notion of turning down Pfizer for doses that would be enough for a lot of people, and preferred to save money to a local produced vaccine, proved that Scott Morrison placed money over Australians’ lives. When money cannot buy you happiness, in this case money can buy you, for this moment, resistance against one of the deadliest viruses of our generation. While I do not question that locally produced vaccine would help with supply, or can help the Morrison government to boast about better management of budget at the next election campaign, sticking with only one vaccine during a global pandemic without a backup plan is what I have issues about with the Scott Morrison government. This is especially true when we are dealing with an up to this moment still relatively unknown and highly agile and contagious virus. If Scott Morrison was serious about putting Australians at the front of the vaccination queue, he would have accepted Pfizer’s offer back then, so when the AstraZeneca vaccine has issues with some patients, there will still be enough doses to continue with the vaccination, so the protection bubble can continue to grow.
By deciding not to do so, Scott Morrison is either lack of vision or planning capability, or does not care about the lives and livelihood of the same people who actually funded his lifestyle – all the tax payers in Australia. When he announced that vaccination ‘is not a race’ to defend his decisions, we already knew where his heart lies.
However, the current situation we are in is not just a product of the Scott Morrison government’s failure either. There were other parties at play.
Similar to the US, there is currently a strong movement in the Australian society questioning everything and every policy whenever they did not fit into their agendas. They disguised themselves as conservatives, but in fact, like sewage in pipes, consist of all forms of conspiracy theories, far-right populists, anti-vaxxers, etc. etc. They once went about their own stuff themselves, but the pandemic had successfully put them into a blender and blended them together before sending them down the sewage lines. They feed off each other and continue to mutate like the virus, as if it is a competition to see who wipe out who first. Conspiracy theories of the pandemic is a hoax; or the pandemic is a lie from the government to put microchips into our bodies; or mitigation policies are products of left-wing lunatics who want to destroy capitalism and establish communism in the country; or you will die faster and easier if you take the vaccine; and in some cases, to reap from profits selling you products that you can be immune from the virus without the vaccine. All this misinformation, facilitated by social media and some Murdoch media personalities, became complimentary packages to dissuade part of our population to get vaccinated (and ironically, some of these Murdoch personalities like Alan Jones, were vaccinated, speaking of hypocrisy). The end result, these trouble-making souls became agents of super spreaders and we went back to where we started in a vicious cycle.
I will not respond to each and every one of these arguments because that means giving them a platform to survive. For me, the best way to stop a fire is to rid it of its oxygen. But speaking as someone who is working in healthcare, the amount of work my colleagues and I have put in to ensure patient information is correct before every dose is administered, the work that we did to source equipment and materials to set up pop-up clinics and mass vaccination hubs, the work that all healthcare staff put into their planning to move numerous wards to accommodate the surge of COVID ICU patients while protecting other patients on the hospital grounds, and the risk that testing clinic and COVID ICU staff take everyday to keep Australians, vaccinated or unvaccinated, safe, already speaks volume about how real this threat is. It will be up to individuals to decide whether they wanted to see facts as facts, or whether they wanted to continue to listen to only speeches that please their ears and put themselves and everyone they love at risk.
The vaccination tangle that we are current in is not something we wanted to see. Australia sailed through the several waves relatively unscathed does not guarantee a bright future. This, we can see, right at this moment, from the current Delta variant outbreak. But, unless everyone is willing to untangle the situation to reveal the simple truth with simple facts, we will never be out of this entanglement. We all treasure our rights to free speech. But when this so called ‘free speech’ is spreading misinformation and costing our fellow Australians’ lives, is the right to free speech of a few more important, or is the basic right for everyone to simply live and be alive more important? That is the most basic and most important question to be asked when we are still living in the storm of a pandemic.
Australia maybe was living in the eye of this storm once, and experienced quiet and sunnier days, but the storm will move its position continuously, and so must Australia be able to prepare for the rainy days and destructive times when we are out of the eye of this storm.
It takes two to tango. If we want to move out of this vaccination tangle, every one of us must dance according to the right tune and rhythm, otherwise it will just be a floor of entanglement that some might never be able to get out of.
How Australia can come out of this and future waves will now be depending on how every Australian wants to dance this dance.
