Australian prime minister Scott Morrison’s handling of Australia’s coronavirus vaccination rollout has been labelled one of the worst public policy failures in recent times.
The Prime Minister is under growing pressure over the slow and problem-plagued delivery of Covid-19 jabs, blamed for the worsening and extended lockdowns now affecting 12 million people.
Australia has ranked last of all OECD countries in terms of percentage of the adult population vaccinated and is even lagging some developing nations.
A trio of academics say a series of flaws have derailed efforts to squash covid here, from an over-reliance on AstraZeneca to a failure to secure enough doses for the population and a lack of vaccine awareness initiatives.
Carolyn Holbrook, an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award Fellow at Deakin University, and Monash University politics and political sciences professors James Walton and Paul Strangio say the prospect of life returning to some level of normality now appears distant.
“In recent weeks, we have learned more about the flaws in the federal Coalition government’s vaccination program,” they wrote in an article for The Conversation.
“There’s the failure to procure sufficient vaccine and an accompanying over-reliance on the AstraZeneca vaccine. The complications with rolling out the latter have exposed the shortage of supply of the Pfizer vaccine.
“While other international leaders personally lobbied Pfizer executives for supplies, Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Health Minister Greg Hunt were inexplicably passive.”
https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/le ... f57dc17d00
Now this is disgraceful
20 Jul 2021, 11:47 pm
