[Theme Music Starts]

RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.
Just two weeks after the first injection was delivered, Australia’s Covid-19 vaccination rollout is already behind schedule.

But while the headlines have focused on issues with vaccine supply and delivery, there are much deeper problems that risk slowing things down even further.

Today, national correspondent for The Saturday Paper Mike Seccombe, on the challenges to the federal government’s vaccination plan… and what’s at stake if we don’t get it right.

[Theme Music Ends]

RUBY:

So Mike - the vaccine rollout has finally begun. Tell me about it!

MIKE:

Well, Australia's vaccine plan is officially up and running.

Archival tape -- Greg Hunt:

“Well welcome everybody to the Castle Hill Medical Centre.”

“Today marks the commencement of Australia's National COVID-19 Vaccination Program.”

MIKE:

And as of the end of last week, 30,000 Australians had received the first dose of vaccine, that was the Pfizer vaccine, and they were primarily frontline workers and older Australians in high risk categories.

Archival tape -- Greg Hunt:

“Australians have stood shoulder to shoulder over the course of the last year, and now they are putting their shoulders to the job.”

MIKE:

So that's a start. 30,000 is a start, but it's actually around half what the prime minister, Scott Morrison and the health minister, Greg Hunt, said would be vaccinated at this point. When they unveiled the details of their vaccination plan a couple of weeks ago.

Archival tape -- Greg Hunt:

“Over the course of this week we hope to see over 60,000 vaccinations, 240 different aged care centres,190 towns and suburbs…”

MIKE:

Hunt told reporters that over the course of the first week of the rollout, he hoped to see some 60,000 vaccinations across 240 different aged care centres, 190 towns and suburbs around the country. And this was the key to Morrison's plan, he said we were on track, to see the whole population vaccinated by October.

Archival tape -- Scott Morrison:

“This is about getting through the whole population. We said we’d get there by October and that’s... we’re on track.”

MIKE:

So that's their goal. And it's a goal that has been described by experts I spoke to as very, very, very, three very’s, ambitious. Based on how slowly things are going so far and on the basis of some of the teething issues that we've experienced.

RUBY:

OK, so let's dig down into some of this. The plan, which is only in the very early stages of being rolled out at this stage, is already falling behind. So what is it that's slowing us down? What are some of those teething issues?

MIKE:

Well let me enumerate a couple. Two days after Morrison and Hunt held their press conference, two residents in a Brisbane aged care home, aged 88 and 94, were given four times the approved dose of the Pfizer vaccine.

And that was administered to them by a doctor who had not been properly trained. The doctor was stood down and subsequently so was the chief executive of Health Care Australia, which is the company that failed to ensure the doctor was trained and the CEO stood down because the government was initially misled about his training.

Days after that, another private company contracted to help with the rollout, Aspen Medical, revealed that 25 vials of the Pfizer vaccine had to be thrown away on suspicion that they hadn't been correctly refrigerated. So that was another one.

Now, you could say these are human errors, but there's a much bigger problem here, too. And that goes to a lack of clear communication between different levels of government and between government and contractors and between officials and frontline medical staff. And that's a crucial problem because the vaccine plan relies on the federal government, which is responsible for procuring the vaccine, working closely with everyone else who is responsible for delivering it.

And it seems there may be some glitches in that process.

RUBY:

OK, so tell me more about that. What is it exactly that's going wrong in this junction between procuring the vaccine, which is the federal government's responsibility, and actually administering the vaccine which falls to the states?

MIKE:

Well, on Monday last week, the New South Wales Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, publicly at a media conference complained about lack of federal government communication.

Archival tape -- Gladys Berejiklian:

“We would like to know as soon as possible how many doses NSW is receiving, our teams are ready and willing to step up and increase our capacity but we just need to know exactly how many doses we are getting beyond week four.”

MIKE:

She said they had failed to inform her government exactly how many doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine the state would receive, which, of course, is obviously crucial to the state's plan to administer.

Archival tape -- Gladys Berejiklian:

“That’s why information sharing is key and I appreciate that the federal government’s job is far more complex than having to roll out the vaccine nationally, ours is just NSW and the only point we’ll make is the data sharing is really important moving forward.”

MIKE:

Then on Wednesday, she again complained about a lack of information about which aged care facilities had received the Pfizer vaccine from the Commonwealth.

The state was also concerned that private contractors to the federal government were only vaccinating residents in aged care, when the state understood that staff would also be vaccinated at the same time.

Archival tape -- Gladys Berejiklian:

“It would help us enormously if we knew which aged care facilities had received the vaccine, it would really assist us, just in terms of our own planning projections and also whether the staff at those aged care facilities had received the vaccine.”

MIKE:

Moreover the federal government announced that they would bring in the Defence Force in to help with the rollout, and the states only discovered this after it appeared in the media.

So, Berejiklian was cranky. My understanding is that other states are cranky too. As Berejiklian put it, you know, if the government were all to play as one team in the rollout, they needed to make sure that they were sharing information when it was available with each other.

And and, you know, there's a number of instances now where that hasn't happened.

RUBY:

So given all of this, Mike, does it look likely that we actually are going to be able to make the government's stated timeline of having the population of Australia vaccinated by October?

MIKE:

Well, I spoke to Karen Price, who's the president of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, and she told me quite bluntly that it wasn't going to happen.

Archival tape -- Karen Price:

“That would mean that we would have to get everyone done, who is eligible, first dose, by July, which is, that's not possible.“

MIKE:

She said that her understanding was informed by what the government's own top health advisers had told her last week when she specifically asked them about the feasibility of Morison's publicly announced target.

Archival tape -- Mike Seccombe:

“Tell me the question you asked and tell me the answer you got?”

Archival tape -- Karen Price:

“The answer I got was that October deadline is more a ministerial declaration, so because AstroZeneca is now going to be 12 weeks it makes it pretty impossible to get everyone.”

MIKE:

They just told her that that was what she called a quote, ministerial declaration rather than a realistic goal.

RUBY:

We’ll be back after this.

[Advertisement]

RUBY:

Mike, we've been talking about the problems in being able to distribute the vaccine efficiently, but there is this other problem - and that's to do with people actually going out and getting vaccinated. And a big challenge around that is misinformation about the vaccine. Right. What can you tell me about that?

MIKE:

Well, obviously, we know that there's a lot of stuff going around on social media.

Archival tape -- Unidentified person 1:

“What we are going to talk about today is this new scam. A government scam. Now there are those who think it is not a scam? What is the scam? It's called the pandemic scam.”

MIKE:

It's an evil plan by Bill Gates to make money or it's going to put little microchips in us to track us.

Archival tape -- Unidentified person 2:

“What he’s saying is absolute propaganda and the same kind of propaganda that he’s perpetrated to kill millions since 1984.”

MIKE:

Or, you know, it will make us infertile, or any number of other crazy untruths are out there.

Archival tape -- Protestors:

“The door, is Bill Gates, it's Fauci, it's Scott Morrison, it's Daniel Andrews and we are the window! That's right! Look around you! Look around you!”

MIKE:

And I might add, it's not just social media. Clive Palmer, billionaire miner, has been running full page ads in some Australian newspapers. I think the Australian, the Murdoch paper, and I think possibly also the West Australian, full of factual inaccuracies, according to the medical regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration.

RUBY:

So how concerned should we be about misinformation, Mike? Is it something that actually threatens the rollout?

MIKE:

Well, a high level of vaccine hesitancy is the way they describe it has been detected in the community. And that is a challenge. But when you break down the numbers, there's maybe a quarter of the population that has concerns. But there's only about seven per cent of people who are really seriously opposed. You know, the anti vaccine brigade, a lot of those other people are not people believing in conspiracy theories.

They’re people with practical and reasonable concerns. You know, there are women who are thinking of getting pregnant or are pregnant or are breastfeeding. And they’re worried about the effect the vaccine might have.

There are other people who just think, well, this is very new. And they worry about the extent to which the trials have been adequate, they’re things like that, are not crazy conspiracy theories, they're rational and they're persuadable. You know, these people, these people can be reached if you go about it the right way.

RUBY:

So it's less about misinformation and more about a lack of information?

MIKE:

Yeah, that's right.

The thing that it underlines here is that facts are important. You know, people are persuadable. They need to be made confident, which is why some of these early missteps are damaging. And people don't need the impression that things are chaotic, that undermines the role that they need to think that things are organised and they need to be told when and where they can do their part.

RUBY:

OK, and that comes back to the main issue here, Mike, which is that the roll out does seem vulnerable and at risk of seeming chaotic. It's behind schedule. There have been a few missteps along the way. And there's this big communication problem. And all of this is a worry because the stakes here are very high. There is a very real impact on all of our lives. Can you tell me about that?

MIKE:

Well, that's right. I mean, if the rollout does proceed more slowly, it will likely have significant consequences, in terms of, you know, border closures and the various other public health precautions that we are all aware of that, we've had to take in, you know, in relation to crowds and masks and all that sort of stuff.

And, you know, we've been seesawing in and out of short lockdowns in a number of major cities. All of these things are likely to continue to happen until we complete the vaccine rollout. And, of course, the big one is reopening our international borders, which is currently planned for mid-June.

So if it takes, months longer, which it looks like, several months longer than the government is telling us, well, that just means that all these other precautions have to be taken for months longer.

MIKE:

And we are fortunate, obviously, in this country. But nonetheless, other countries are much further ahead of us in terms of vaccinating their populations. The UK has given the first dose to more than 30 percent of its population, the US, which had Trump until quite recently. Nonetheless, it's at 25 per cent first doses. Israel has around 40 per cent of its population fully vaccinated, both doses. So Australia's coped very well so far, in part due to luck and due to geography. But also, I think because we had political will to listen to the experts and we had a cohesive population that agreed by and large to cooperate with the recommendations in the health measures.

And if we are to maintain our good fortune, we will need an awful lot of what has been somewhat lacking in the initial stages of the rollout. And that's clear communication.

This will have to be the year of clear communication, if we are to fulfil the promise of our first year in our first year is very good. If the second year is very good, we’ve got to start communicating what the next steps are. And so far I think that hasn't been done as well as it might.

RUBY:

Mike, thanks for your time today.

MIKE:

Thank you.

[Advertisement]

[Theme Music Starts]

RUBY:

Also in the news today…

The Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews is in intensive care in hospital after suffering damage to his vertebrae and ribs.

Andrews fell over at his home while getting ready for work this morning. He said he was extremely grateful to the Ambulance Victoria paramedics who attended him, and would provide an update later in the week.

And testing has shown a second strong result of COVID-19 within Adelaide’s wastewater. A spokesperson for SA Health said that “At this stage, there is no clear explanation” for the result.

It comes as the state recorded two new infections on Tuesday, both returned travellers in hotel quarantine.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am, see you tomorrow.

[Theme Music Ends]

Archival tape -- Dolly Parton:

“Well hey it’s me, I'm finally gonna get my vaccine, I’m so excited, I’ve been waiting a while, I’m old enough to get it and I'm smart enough to get it. So I’m very happy that I'm gonna get my Moderna shot today and I wanted to tell everybody and I think you should get there and do it too. I even changed one of my songs to fit the occasion.

It goes. Vaccine vaccine vaccine vaccine I’m begging of you please don’t hesitate.

Vaccine vaccine vaccine vaccine cause once you are dead, then that's a bit too late.

I know I’m trying to be funny now, but I’m dead serious about the vaccine.”