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Mike's Minute: Vaccine numbers don't lie

Author
Mike Hosking,
Publish Date
Thu, 19 Aug 2021, 9:54AM

Mike's Minute: Vaccine numbers don't lie

Author
Mike Hosking,
Publish Date
Thu, 19 Aug 2021, 9:54AM

Numbers are interesting things and can lead to good insight. We are now doing 55,000 doses of the vaccine a day.

If we had started when we should have and taken the Government's overused mantra of "going hard and going early" we would have needed about 150 days to get the whole vaccine programme fully completed. 

55,000 a day for five months would have seen over eight million doses handed out. That would give us about the coverage most western nations have been able to deal with before you hit a fairly serious wall of resistance. 

By my count, we’d need about four and a bit million vaccinated to make up about 80 percent coverage, so you start in February with the vaccines we got because we were at the "front of the queue" and by the end of June we would have been done. 

If you look at Australia in general and New South Wales specifically, they are off and running. That's for a couple of good reasons and if our government were smart, they'd look and learn. 

Until very recently New Zealand and Australia were in rough lockstep in terms of rollout.  

Both of us were abysmal. But what Australia has done is buy more and in locking down these past few weeks, they've incentivised by default. 

The daily number of jabs are through the roof and as a result will now exponentially take off faster than our rollout. The key difference is they have an incentive, we don't. 

Although our Prime Minister yesterday at the one o'clock pulpit of truth lecture implored us to get a jab. What she didn’t do is offer the incentive the Australians have. Both Scott Morrison and Gladys Berejiklian have given targets for freedoms. 

What we have got is no targets, and as of the Sir David Skegg report and yesterday's reminders from Stuart Nash and Grant Robertson, vaccination does not prevent lockdowns. So, if you figure you won't get Covid, or you figure you're young and don’t really worry about Covid, and you're getting locked down anyway, why are you in a hurry? 

The September 1 opening of bookings for everyone will be a big reveal. Just what sort of resistance is there? If 80 percent of us aren't jabbed or booked in, then what? 

Virtually every country in the world has an incentive to get jabbed. Money, pizza, a mandate on entry, a numerical target, but we, apparently, are unique so we need none of it. 

If naivety was a policy, we'd be winning prizes. But the number to remind us how hopeless this all is 118. That’s our rank in the world's vaccine rollout. 

118th. Numbers don’t lie.   

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