Australia is great at outbreak response but something is lacking when it comes to the country’s vaccine rollout.
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On Wednesday afternoon, between interviews in Canberra, my phone buzzed with a disturbing message from my wife: New Covid case in Sydney, at the movie theater.
We’d gone to see a different film than the 60-something driver who carried the dangerous Delta variant, but we were at the same place at the same time on Sunday afternoon, which meant that me, my son and my wife were all within the dragnet of yet another outbreak.
“So freaking annoying,” my wife wrote.
What followed was definitely that, and all too familiar. The canceled plans. The scramble to get tested. The self-isolation. It was a personal version of the story I had just published that same day — about how Australia and so many of the countries in Asia that led the world in containing the coronavirus are now stuck languishing in the race to put it behind them.
I’d written the article with local reporting and help from my colleagues in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and elsewhere. I never expected to be thrown so quickly into the maelstrom again myself. But maybe, just maybe, it’s valuable. My experience, so far at least, points quite clearly to what I’d heard from so many others about the mix of competence and caution — or is it complacency? — that has defined this Covid moment in Australia, and sparked everything from resignation to rage.
The good news is that Australia (at the state level) has become extremely sharp when it comes to outbreak management. I was able to get tested late Wednesday night in a suburb of Canberra, and my negative result arrived a few hours later with a text message at 3:07 a.m.
In Sydney, my wife’s visit to a busy pop-up clinic had her in and out in record time.
The health workers we called to report ourselves as potential contacts were also polite and reasonable. They all seemed to have the same matter-of-fact tone of Gladys Berejiklian, the New South Wales premier, tamping down panic while pleading for patience.
But at one point, while talking to Andrew, the friendly and thorough contact tracer in New South Wales whom my wife and I both spoke to Wednesday night, I started to see the problem. It was when he asked me if I had been vaccinated.
“No,” I said. “I have an appointment for next month.”
What I immediately thought (but did not say) was that I could have had a shot sooner. Because of an error with the state’s online registration process that had allowed anyone to sign up, I’d made an earlier appointment before I was technically eligible. I canceled a few minutes later. It didn’t feel right. I’d given up my spot (which would have made me fully vaccinated by now) for the same reason I was talking to Andrew: I wanted to do my part, to keep the system fair, to serve that same collective spirit that made Australia do so well with Covid’s first phase.
Andrew seemed to share that “mateship” ethos. He told me, with the cheer of a music lover who had just scored concert tickets, that he had just gotten an AstraZeneca jab. He was quite happy to hear that I had signed up for a vaccination of my own, in my case, the Pfizer shot.
He was so happy in fact that it made me realize what was missing from the public debate. Enthusiasm for the promise of a vaccinated community — that’s what he exuded. It’s what animated our conversation even at 10:30 p.m., and it is what Australian officials, from the prime minister on down, have somehow lost the ability to conjure up.
Where are the officials and celebrities, I wondered, rallying “Team Australia,” asking everyone to pitch in by embracing vaccinations? Where is the cheer squad shouting “how great is this,” crowing about how vaccines can bring countries and the world back together?
On Thursday, when I watched public health officials in Sydney talk about the latest outbreak at their daily news conference, I did not pick up on anything that resembled Andrew’s encouragement, optimism or “we’re all in this together, get a vaccine” vibe.
All I heard was the same old, same old. Follow health advice. Get tested, get isolated.
The vaccines came up only in the context of a new decision to change the age range for those who should be using the AstraZeneca vaccine from 50 to 60 and above. Officials, looking dour, signaled that it was being done in large part because a woman who was 52 recently died, the second death in Australia believed to be linked to the AstraZeneca jab.
The decision to curtail the AstraZeneca vaccine will further delay Australia’s already weak inoculation rollout. Whether the narrower range is the right call or not, I’m not equipped to say. But my chat with Andrew made me wonder how often the public also hears the context.
According to the most recent government report, about 3.6 million AstraZeneca doses have been given in Australia, and there have been 31 confirmed cases of blood clots, and 10 probable cases. Of those, 23 have been discharged and are recovering.
In other words, the vast majority of people receiving the vaccine — and Pfizer’s as well — are better off with the shots than without.
Many Australians understand that. Many millennials are eager to get vaccinated. Some people we interviewed in Melbourne spent many hours and days calling and calling again to get a vaccine appointment. Beyond the AstraZeneca jab, which can be made here, Australia is also somewhat at the mercy of foreign suppliers, which makes it harder to just encourage everyone to go get a vaccine, as I wrote in my story. Clearly, there needs to be a process of pragmatic and efficient prioritization.
But here’s the thing that many of us in Sydney learned once again this week: Australia is good at that!
A lot of Australians are frustrated because they can see the same gap I saw, and they are asking the same questions I’ve been asking this week: Why can’t the vaccine program be as well run as the testing and tracing program?
Epidemiologists will tell you, as they’ve told me, that the reasons are complicated, but the solution is relatively clear. To put Covid behind us, everyone needs to do their part. The government and anyone else with influence needs to get better at organizing, explaining and promoting immunization, loudly, and often.
Australians, experts argue, also need to make vaccination a priority with the same zeal they apply to getting tested, and for the same reasons driving us all to get those swabs rolled around our sinuses: because it’s the right thing to do for others, and for ourselves.
People like Andrew — one of the many stuck dealing with every new outbreak — deserve nothing less.
Tell me what you’re doing or seeing others do to help Australia move forward and get beyond the pandemic at nytaustralia@nytimes.com. Enthusiasm will be welcomed.
Now here are our stories of the week.
Australia and the Region
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Britain Signs Its First Major Post-Brexit Trade Deal With Australia The agreement will include a cap on tariff-free imports for 15 years, a measure intended to appease British farmers concerned about a flood of beef and sheep imports.
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An Internet Outage Affects Company Websites in Australia and Beyond. Analysts said the glitch was caused by service disruptions at a hosting platform, Akamai, based in the United States.
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Why Asia, the Pandemic Champion, Remains Miles Away From the Finish Line While the United States edges toward normalcy, countries like Japan, South Korea and Australia are still facing months of uncertainty and isolation as their vaccination campaigns just start to gain steam.
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Hollywood Take on Christchurch Massacre Provokes Anger in New Zealand Members of the Muslim community denounced as “white saviorism” the director’s decision to focus on the response by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
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In Australia, a New Look at Immigration: ‘It’s About Our Friends’ In a country inured to criticism over its migrant policies, a case involving a 3-year-old detainee who ended up hospitalized has drawn outrage.
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These Brittle Stars Have Thousands of ‘Pig Snouts’ on Each Arm Scientists have described a new family of brittle stars from a single specimen from a seamount off New Caledonia.
Around the Times
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Victoria’s Secret Swaps Angels for ‘What Women Want.’ Will They Buy It? The embattled lingerie giant is attempting the most extreme brand turnaround in recent memory: an effort to redefine not just itself but also the very idea of what “sexy” is.
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For Biden, Europe Trip Achieved 2 Major Goals. And Then There Is Russia. The president reassured European allies that America is back and rallied them to begin to counter China. Whether he established “red lines” for the Kremlin remains to be seen.
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My Father Vanished When I Was 7. The Mystery Made Me Who I Am. My dad was a riddle to me, even more so after he disappeared. For a long time, who he was — and by extension who I was — seemed to be a puzzle I would never solve.
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Opinion: Should the Olympics Be Canceled? They could prove a much-needed symbol of global solidarity — or a superspreader event.
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