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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

Australia’s two largest states are getting ready to end their long lockdowns.

Both Victoria and NSW are due to reopen within weeks - when 80 percent of eligible residents are fully vaccinated.

But what about the 20 percent of people left out - those yet to receive their vaccines?

Today, senior reporter for The Saturday Paper Rick Morton on who the 20 percent really are - and how they fell through the cracks of the national vaccine rollout.

It’s Tuesday, October 5.

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RUBY:

Rick, Australia’s vaccine rollout has taken a long, long time to ramp up. We started very late, but how are things looking now?

RICK:

The good news is on the way. You know, the country is well on track to hit that key figure of 80 percent of the eligible population being fully vaccinated before the end of the year. The speed at which it will happen varies state by state, but in the two states hit by the biggest outbreaks who happen to be our two largest states, New South Wales and Victoria, it will likely happen by the end of October and the beginning of November.

And that's when life will start to look quite a bit different, especially for vaccinated people. So they'll be given the freedom to move around, to visit each other, to go to restaurants, you know, with density restrictions and all the rest of it and some light overlays of public health measures. But freedom to a degree.

And that's obviously something a lot of people are looking forward to given how long residents in those states have been in lockdown. But it does raise questions about what happens to that other 20 per cent, those one in five who aren't going to be vaccinated by then.

RUBY:

Mm and who are those people? Rick, what do we know about the 20 per cent of people who aren't going to be vaccinated in time for for New South Wales and Victoria to reopen?

RICK:

Despite what you might think, it's actually less likely to be people who are vaccine hesitant or anti-vaxxers or what researchers call objectors. They may make up a proportion of that group. Of course, they're always there, but most of those people are actually likely to be some of the most marginalised communities and the people most at risk of serious ill health and even death if they catch the virus. You know, we're talking about the poorest, the sickest, people with disabilities and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who haven't been able to get access to the vaccine, despite the fact that they were supposed to be in the priority groups at the start of the year.

RUBY:

Right. So how did that happen?

RICK:

Let's start with people with disabilities, for example, so they were allocated to phase 1A of the initial rollout.

Archival tape -- Scott Morrison:

“Those populations in that first phase of quarantine and border workers, frontline health officials, as well as those working in aged care and disability care and those in aged care and disability care residents.”

RICK:

They were supposed to be one of the first groups vaccinated by the end of March was the original.

Archival tape -- Scott Morrison:

“And we hope by the end of February, end of March, I should say to to have reached some four million population.”

RICK:

But last week, evidence presented to a Senate committee found that only two thirds of National Disability Insurance Scheme participants who were living in shared accommodation, and that's one of the key indicators of risk, were fully vaccinated. That's about 30 percent who are not inoculated against this really dangerous virus.

Then when you take a look at Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, another group that was prioritised in phase 1b and also 2A, the discrepancy is even worse.

Archival tape -- John Frewen:

“Forty five point nine percent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians have been vaccinated with the first dose and twenty nine point one percent for the second dose.”

RICK:

So COVID Shield Commander Lieutenant General John Frewen, who the federal government appointed to head up the rollout, told the Senate that just 29 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the country have had a second dose of any COVID vaccine.

Archival tape -- John Frewen:

“The Commonwealth state and territory health departments and community representatives have jointly identified and commenced acceleration activities in three priority areas to increase vaccination rates of indigenous Australians.”

RICK:

Now, these discrepancies have been slowly building throughout the year, but they only really became obvious to the rest of society when the Delta outbreak began and exposed how far behind we actually were in vaccinating these groups.

RUBY:

Mm hmm. So now that we're seeing Delta spread in New South Wales and in Victoria, the inequity in the rollout is becoming clear because those are the people who are getting sick.

RICK:

Correct. Lots of chief health officers have said repeatedly that this virus finds the unvaccinated. It preys on them.

Archival tape -- Dr. Kerry Chant:

“I don't want to leave anyone behind as we get that target of 92 per cent because the question I'll always raise is when we get to that 92 per cent and ninety three per cent who is in that seven per cent, that hasn't been vaccinated. And is it because they haven't had enough access and I've got to say.”

RICK:

And so because in this outbreak, particularly in New South Wales, we've watched this spread like wildfire through vulnerable communities, regional communities in New South Wales and the West to the far west and north west, where many Aboriginal people live.

Archival tape -- News Reporter:

“There is growing concern from authorities tonight over rising COVID case numbers in our regions, with far western New South Wales especially vulnerable.”

“Somebody, somebody, just anybody. Get this out. They this is this is what's going on in Wilcannia.”

RICK:

So the virus really swept through just as an example, it swept through the remote Aboriginal terrible Kenya, where more than one in six residents have now been infected.

Archival tape -- News Reporter:

“Reinforcements to battle the outbreak in the outback food supplies for tiny Wilcannia, 11 hours drive from Sydney.”

RICK:

Whereas maybe in a few weeks there were over 150 cases of COVID 19 in a town of around 750 people, and the majority of those infected were Aboriginal.

Archival tape -- News Reporter:

“With overcrowded housing making isolation difficult.”

“We were calling out in March last year, 18 months ago about prevention for our community.”

RUBY:

So we're talking about groups of people who we knew were at risk. They were prioritised at the start of the vaccine rollout for that very reason. But despite that, vaccination rates for these groups, they're lower than for everyone else, and now they're getting sick. So why is that? What went wrong with the rollout itself?

RICK:

I mean, I think the very, very data point tells you the story, right? They were the priority, but we had to go to them and we didn't go to them. And as soon as I opened up the roll out to the rest of the population who were able to go to a GP clinic or to a state vaccination hub or now to a pharmacist, that was fine, you could do that. You had the motivation, you had the access, you could do it. But there are so many people for whom there are so many barriers and we didn't go to them.

And on top of that, there was a whole bunch of poor communication, poor outrage, of course, and mixed messaging and people in disability care that supported accommodation were actually deprioritized by the federal government the Department of Health admitted that in a Senate hearing in April.

Archival tape -- Senate Committee:

“And what about disability? You don't break that down, and there's nowhere I've been able to find that would give an indication of what's happening in disability facilities.”

“So disability facilities has been a much slower start than we would have liked.”

RICK:

And they said, look, we were actually really worried about aged care because of course, we had almost 700 people die in aged care in Victoria alone last year and they were extremely spooked by that happening again.

Archival tape -- Senate Committee:

“The initial slow start in aged care residents required us to pivot to make sure we focus on them on the basis that they have been both in practise and on their advice, the most vulnerable group.”

RICK:

And even though aged care staff and residents were on the same priority level as disabled staff and residents, the Commonwealth made a decision to focus the resources of the rollout on aged care. But they never told anyone about that decision. And so there was not even any opportunity for disabled people, advocates and other people in that sector to even argue the case.

Archival tape -- Senate Committee:

“So the disability piece is now we're turning our attention to that in greater. So it has been done. They have been small numbers of disability facilities. What would they be? And there's nowhere I've been able to find any information on this….”

RICK:

But now the federal government is throwing millions of dollars at private companies to try and resolve precisely these issues in this desperate attempt to boost vaccine numbers in the communities where they've been lagging behind as soon as possible. And it's come really late in the piece.

RUBY:

We'll be back in a moment.

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RUBY:

Rick, we're talking about the 20 percent of people who won't be vaccinated by the time we begin reopening. Overwhelmingly, those are people in marginalised communities. You've said that the federal government is now spending what sounds like a lot of money to try and solve this problem. So can you tell me more about that? What is the plan exactly?

RICK:

Yeah. So it's pretty clear that the government is desperately trying to plug these vaccination gaps. And a flurry of tenders and contracts have been announced for PR and communications services companies to try and get those rates up.

So in September, the Department of Health entered a nine month $770,000 contract with carbon created, and that's specifically for public relations on COVID 19 vaccine communication targeting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. Now this is September, when they entered this contract, as in the month just gone when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders were meant to be vaccinated in some of the first priority groups.
Now, really interesting to me that 10 days later it took out another tender with First Nations Media Australia, and in that notice, they actually said that the reason they were doing this on September 16, 2021, as a limited tender was because of extreme urgency or unforeseen events, which is really just another way of saying we didn't really prepare.

So the government is running around now acting like and claiming that that these are all unexpected issues, that it was unforeseen, quote unquote. But it was entirely foreseeable. This is not something where we're talking with the benefit of hindsight. There was foresight, or at least there should have been, and it should not have taken outbreaks in deaths to force them to finally see that.

RUBY:

Hmm. Right, and so it sounds like the proposed solve here is to pay these companies to do outreach, to convince people in these communities to get vaccinated now that there is actually enough of the vaccine to go around. And there is this kind of underlying supposition here from the federal government that this isn't their fault. This isn't a problem that they could possibly have seen coming. But we know that's not the case, right?

RICK:

No, no. I mean, it's just absolutely untrue. And for those representing the most at risk in Australian communities, you know, the aged, disabled and indigenous - this is a particularly galling characterisation.

Archival tape -- Damien Griffith:

“You know, I don't buy the argument that, you know, I mean, this is about preparedness, isn't it? Yeah.”

RICK:

Damien Griffith, the chief executive of the first people with Disability Network, told me that he doesn't buy that argument one bit. He said he'd been warning governments of this issue right from the start.

Archival tape -- Damien Griffith:

“There's a number of things that we flagged at the First Peoples Disability Network back in May last year, so they included not only the issue of fair and equitable access to vaccines.”

RICK:

In fact, they wrote their policy positions on all of these issues in May last year.

Archival tape -- Damien Griffith:

“We kind of understand the devastation of pandemics and what in the history of First Nations communities. So we were anxious to really put it on the public record very early, that there needed to be a specific well thought through process to reach First Nations people with disability.”

RICK:

And they've been flagging this risk. They knew in their own communities. And many health advocates for indigenous people and for people with disabilities have actually warned about this outcome for the last 18 months, over and over and over again. So seeing this last minute scramble while people they represent get sick to them, it's not just galling, but it's also unfortunately, it's not shocking because they weren't being listened to along the way.

RUBY:

Mm yeah, I can imagine. And when you think about what we're seeing play out right now, the Delta variant spreading, people dying. Is this now too little, too late? Because it's only a matter of weeks until New South Wales and Victoria open up, so there's not a lot of time to really turn this around, Rick.

RICK:

Well, yeah, and that's, you know, that's just obvious on the timeline. This job was meant to be finished two months ago, and it's not and people have died, and it's impossible to know how many disabled people have been caught up in all of this because even though they were abandoned in the priority group, we can't tell now how many ultimately wound up seriously injured or dead. The data is just not presented in a way that allows that proper analysis. But is this inequity? It's obvious it's the last ditch attempt to fix it says so much about, you know, who gets protected before we reopen. You know, as a country and the kind of it's almost like that last minute. It's like, Oh God, we haven't fixed this yet, when it should have been proactive along the way.

Archival tape -- Damien Griffith:

“I feel very uncomfortable about the way we view some of our most vulnerable people in Australian society. You know, we need to value every Australian life.”

RICK:

And the people who are at grave risk are the disadvantaged anywhere as Damien Griffiths told me, and he said he finds it difficult to think of any group that's more outside of public consciousness than Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are disabled.

Archival tape -- Damien Griffith:

“And we need to address that problem urgently now as a priority, but also learn the lessons of this of what kind of society you want to be moving forward, I think. Mm-Hmm.”

RICK:

So if those people are the ones who end up bearing the brunt of the illnesses and deaths in our community as we open up, then that's an indictment on us. It's an indictment on society, and it's particularly an indictment on the federal government's vaccine rollout. It didn't have to be that way.

RUBY:

Rick, thank you so much for your time.

RICK:

Thanks, Ruby. I appreciate it.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…

The NSW Deputy Premier John Barilaro announced his resignation on Monday. The Nationals leader cited media scrutiny and his ongoing defamation case involving YouTube personality friendlyjordies as major factors in his decision to resign.

Barilaro has said that he will call a party room meeting for this Wednesday where a ballot will be held to find his replacement. He says he has no plans to make a switch to federal politics.

And a philanthropic group will offer fully vaccinated Australians the chance to win $1m as part of a new lottery. The campaign, which launched yesterday, will feature a $4.1 million dollar prize pool, with the top prize of 1 million dollars to be drawn on November 5.

I’m Ruby Jones, See ya tomorrow.

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