The Grattan Institute's recommendation was for 80 percent of all Australians to be fully vaccinated, including 95 percent of Australians over 70 (not 60) and others at high risk.

80 percent of all Australians to be fully vaccinated - that's off with the fairies in terms of being achievable. Over 70s represent roughly 10 percent of the population so 95 percent coverage of that cohort gets you to 9.5 percent of your 80 percent of all Australians target. So far, so good - 70.5 percent to go.

Now for the mugging by reality. Presently there are no COVID-19 vaccines approved for children under 12 and the under 12s cohort represents 15 percent of the population.

So now you're chasing that 70.5 percent from the 13 - 69 cohort or 75 percent of the total population. That requires 94 percent coverage - completely and utterly unrealistic on a great day for vaccination compliance. Try lining that 94 percent compliance for 13 - 69 year olds up against this data on hesitancy from The Melbourne Institute.

https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....aa5be1aa3d.png
https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....3cd6b3b969.png

It is just sheer lunacy to be setting down "targets" like that. It would be easier to just say "never".

This stuff needs to be tested against reality and implementability. Israel seems to be managing okay with lower vaccination levels; we need to be going to school on their experience.

Yep.

Due to minimum post lengths: I agree.

My bad. I was driving in afternoon traffic and in rain that was "hissing" down.

On another note, I also heard (I think) a report of Pfizer being used (tested??) on a child (children??) as young as two years old some place in the U.S.

When will the lunacy of these governments stop! I want the choice on how I live I don't want inept premiers and Prime Minister now and the next one telling me they're keeping me safe, I can do that. Good on QLD for going hard again over one case I'm sure the small business owner who is about to throw 10-20 maybe 30K of food out thanks you immensely also. Lets just hope the spread of this highly contagious Delta variants does not spread because you locked down without notice and sent 1000s off ppl to que in the supermarkets all together the pictures I seen there is no 1.5m spacing due everyone wanting to get the same packet of bog wrap, again how much do you need for 3 days is there an alternate use let me know please.

The scariest thing I see now, the acceptance of these lock downs, its so normal to Australians and the fear I have this is the future well beyond. Sco Mo 4 step plan out of this I have come to realize today, this will not end any time before 2022 and well in to 2023 if we are lucky. from and aviation perspective even scarier there will come a time where one of the two will fall and be a memory which one, I don't know.

I want the choice on how I live I can keep myself and my family safe.

No problemo.

Yes, both Pfizer and Moderna are in Phase II and III trials in the US with under 18 year old cohorts that includes children aged two to 11. University of Pittsburgh and Stanford are two of the paediatric trial sites. The Pfizer trials are the further advanced, due to report in September.

An excellent post of crunched numbers, Mick...So now my question become...What happens if (when) we don't reach those target percentages? No international reopening? No State reopening? Ongoing lockdowns until someone storms parliament like they did Washington?

Aviation lives on What if's and has multiple levels of redundancy for most every critical system or failure mode...So What if we don't reach those targets? What's Phase A of Plan B?

It’s also not just 70% or 80%.

These targets need to be hit on both a national and state level. So highly populous states can’t positively affect the overall number if their vaccination rates are ahead of the rest.

The last lock down WA had many scoffed at it and are over it.

His power is limited and if the test comes. He will not be supported in ANY form of long lockdown (+3 weeks).

He is a goose. Only one card to play.- lets watch the "economy" then.

He has torched all other income, other than crays.

Ban on COVID ships into the Pilbara?, No they are welcome.

Maybe that statement highlights our problem, not the Premier's or the PM's but ours.

come over to sunny sydney if you like. Come check out the ramifications of a politically motivated half arse lockdown

You are in the wrong country if you think you have much say in that. Australia is a Democratic Socialist country, that means the community elects leaders to decide what is best for the community, not for the individual. The only country remotely closer to the Libertarian society you are thinking of is the USA, even that is far from being able to "do what you want" free of the state. And to be honest, you don't want to be a true Libertarian, providing your own medical care and general infrastructure might be harder than you think.

What you are really saying is "I want the ability to do what I did before Covid", which is an ever changing thing, you just notice the big changes like Covid settings.

You get to choose how you live your life within the boundaries of Australian rules and society. Right now the rules are adjusted for pandemic settings, just like they are for wartime or terrorism etc.

Unfortunately you are a human living on earth so you don't have that choice

Australia's pandemic response is a template for military defeat. A nation divided and in a leadership rabble.

If any Australian thinks this pandemic response is what life will look like in confrontation with the Communist Party of China, they need to carefully research where our vulnerabilites as a nation present, ever so neatly exposed by our COVID response.

Right now, I've awoken to the mayhem of living on border towns on the NSW/QLD border with new sets of pandemic rules. Few are and will be following them.

I'm not sure that's quite right, Roughly 17% of the population don't care, have no intention of following any covid rules, they are in every state, we see or hear about them during lockdowns.
Then there's those on the borders where for logistical reasons it's too hard to comply even though they are not anti anything.

NSW has a serious problem now, is it fair to say they have lost control of it and it's going to be a long haul back. I don't see the remaining states changing their game plan to accommodate NSW's problem.

I don't think we can call that a nation divided just yet.

Health and Defence have markedly different Constitutional allocations of accountability and consequent organisational alignments.

I'd forgotten that you'd dodged the vertical fiscal imbalance and s 96 of the Constitution....

You should google that and find out its consequences for the Commonwealth's practical power.

Scotty could, but doesn't want to, step up in this time of national crisis.

I agree -

being a member of society is not optional just as paying tax is not optional. Similarly, not agreeing with the law does not exempt you from obeying it.

For those members of society (willing or reluctant) who choose to engage in civil disobedience as a means of protest, they should do so in the full knowledge that they will likely suffer consequences.

For any involved in aviation, they should be aware that those consequences may compromise their ASIC privilege.

https://www.asic.net.au/question/wha...riminal-record

What exactly do you mean by you “want the choice on how I live?

It's ok our courageous PM will be safe and sound in Hawaii saying "I don't hold the guns mate" while drip feeding the defence force its resources

The only reason that I hadn't responded to that is that it is as utterly inane as the nationhood power you were touting. The notion that a Federal government is going to coerce state compliance during a public health crisis via withholding funding is ridiculous. For starters it would fail to pass the Senate, you know that arm of the legislature known as 'the States' House'. Same applies to Section 96.

It's just another version of a unicorn, very pretty in imagination but does not exist in the real world.

That sort of nonsense would only get a run in the sort of authoritarian state that most rail against. Or are you happy with authoritarianism just so long as those in authority do what you want?

Wartime powers can mean anything. In WW2 the Federal Government used the emergency powers to snatch more control from the states because of the disjointed state of the nation. So if you think the current iteration lacks control, think about how much less power they had pre WW2. Federation could quite easily have been several separate countries within Australia rather than one nation. The larger states governed as independent nations effectively, with their own separate armed forces and governance pre 1901. Victoria had its own navy, ships were HMVS (His Majesties Victorian Ship), including a coastal battleship, infantry, artillery and mounted horse regiments etc. This is why Australian states wield the power they do.

You would have to have much higher death rates going on for any emergency powers to be enacted against the states in a pandemic. There would have to be proof of an undeniable threat to the public that would warrant it.

Dutton would be a better war time prime minister , anti war protestors locked up and online chat sites banned for national security reasons . Getting a covid vaccination or not would bring a smile to your face as you stood in line for compulsory conscription injections . Pressure ramping up this week on getting vaccinations!

It’s so telling when the self-proclaimed “numbers” person drifts into politics and starts using words like “utterly inane” and “nonsense” to describe matters other than statistics.

We are living in an authoritarian state, now. If you could get your head out of the numbers for a moment, you’d see that many Australian are being told, on pain of criminal liability, that they can’t visit their families and friends and can’t travel more than a specified number of kilometres from home. There are police and ADF members on the streets enforcing those restrictions. It suits Scotty that a lot of the consequent ‘blowback’ hits the state premiers rather than him.

The Commonwealth coerces the states, financially, all the time. And the government doesn’t need to make a law that can be stopped by the Senate, to achieve the outcome. And a spending bill that originates in the Senate can be blocked by the government in the House.

The Commonwealth has enough power to take over and run the response on a nationally consistent basis. Its failure to do so is a political decision, plain and simple. It’s probably a blessing in disguise though, because we can only speculate what a clusterf*ck it would be if Scotty or what’s-his-name on the other ‘side’ stepped up.

They had only recently taken control of aged care for national consistency. They could not even run a consistent approach to protect those from Covid. The first outbreak in Sydney saw the vulnerabilities in aged care and then the same vulnerabilities were exposed in Melbourne as if no-one had learned a thing. They finally got the message when it started spreading in Melbourne again this year and increased the vaccination rates. Luckily Victorias state government had their act together by then to soften the spread to them while they acted.

We need to separate the question whether it may be done constitutionally, in principle, on the one hand, and the question whether a government has the requisite competence to do it on the other.

Federal governments have been pretty mediocre for quite a long time. And they'll happily remain that way whilever most of the public accept (or give up in frustration while watching) the blame-shifting games. Just look at quarantine.

But be in no doubt: A pandemic is the paradigm example of a matter that falls squarely within the nationhood power and, even if it didn't, the Commonwealth has more than enough power to 'encourage' the states to implement what the Commonwealth wants (e.g. some semblance of 'order' in the aged care sector). It's a political choice and - I'll say it - political cowardice not to.

Another question. What has happened to the AHPPC? In the beginning we heard about them all the time.. but lately it is like they don’t exist.

Sorry mate, I respectfully disagree and don’t ascribe that level of cunning to Scomo.

He has been weak as p1ss throughout; announcing National cabinet decisions only to have the state premiers walk them backwards as soon as they leave the room.

Sadly for Australians, the rest of Scomo’s cabinet are mediocre at best, the opposition is anything but, and the state premiers have been playing politics from the start and running rings around Scotty from Marketing.

There will be an enquiry or royal commission in due course, but as we saw with the Coate and Brereton enquires, the vigour with which they are pursued varies.

Before the inevitable #istandwithdan responses pour in, I don’t really care.

Wise comment indeed.

The majority of society everywhere appears to want to be vaccinated so that life can return to something approaching normal. To those who say we can't reach the 80% that the current government says is the target, how come the Israelis and Brits are already close to achieving that? Our government's slow response to getting vaccines is certainly one reason why we are way behind the civilized world in this regard but surely we can achieve 80% by early next year.
As for the minority who oppose mandatory vaccination in certain jobs and in order to have certain privileges such as unrestricted travel, it will be interesting to see which wannabe government at the next election wins on such a platform.
Despite the rabble in our midst I think enough sensible Australians will just get the bloody vaccine to get on with life. They have had enough.

No need to apologise. We'll have to agree to disagree.

Nobody gets to where Scotty is without being as cunning as a sh*thouse rat.

Just over 66% of Israelis have received at least one dose of vaccine as of July 11. At the current pace, 70% would have been vaccinated by August 5.

In Israel the vaccination rate had plateaued in April as new COVID infections were on a months-long steady decline. But when the arrival of Delta brought a spike of cases in June, the government jumped in quickly with a new campaign urging teenagers to get the shot and parents to vaccinate their children aged 12 to 15.

They hit a wall in April and May. By May 29, the rate of daily new vaccinations had them on pace to hit 70% sometime in autumn 2022.

https://graphics.reuters.com/HEALTH-...N/xklvyxrdgpg/

Chances of a life threatening blood clot from the AZ vaccine 1 in 1,000,000
Chances of being struck by lightning 1 in 140,000

Sort of puts it into perspective doesn't it.

Im fully done with AZ. My wife is having her second AZ tomorrow. I spent years flying across the North Pole. Getting radiated or taking the chance of diverting to some sxxt hole airport in the middle of nowhere. I’m happy to take my chances with AZ.

Where would we be, in your estimation, if we had received the 3 million AZ doses that did not turn up from Europe and the Pfizer withheld by Biden?

There must be a significant wedge of us oldies just coming due for our second AZ.
Some may have taken up the chance to have their second dose a little earlier when the rules changed but many would have been content to wait out the 12 weeks.
I expect to see a spike in "fully vaccinated" this month.

Unless you have something to back your claim, all the evidence I’ve seen (including a senate inquiry answer by relevant bureaucrats) says Pfizer is delivering to the planned schedule.

Scotty from marketing can’t PR his way out of not ordering enough early on!

in the same place.

Regarding the AZ supply from Italy, from ABC on March 5:

“In a statement a spokesperson for the Health Minister Greg Hunt said the shipment that has already arrived in Australia would "take us through" to when it is made locally from the end of the month.
"[The Italy shipment] is one shipment from one country," they said.
"This shipment was not factored into our distribution plan for coming weeks.
"Domestic production starts with 1 million per week of deliveries from late March and is on track."

and one week later AZ was tarnished in this country.

From the CDC Lightning is one of the leading causes of weather-related fatalities. But the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are only around 1 in 500,000. However, some factors can put you at greater risk for being struck. Regional, seasonal, and occupational differences affect your risk of being injured by lightning.

Last reports - Chance of getting a blood clot from AZ was 1 in 77000

Chance of Xeptu having no idea ... 1 in 1

Sort of puts it into perspective doesn't it.....

Yes,i think you would be right,we are both due in next few weeks & in late may/early june when we got ours the walk in sites were booked out for at least a week in advance so as you say there will be lots due for their 2nd jab soon.

But chance of a fatal clot from AZ is more like 1 in 1000 000.

wrong in relation to AstraZeneca. Had we had those 3 million on time before the great big scare campaign we would be significantly ahead of where we are now. And if people remember we had a target of 4 million doses by the end of March, something that people jumped on Morrison for missing, notably the hopeless Labor party. Now you see why we missed that target.

AstraZeneca, which is producing the COVID-19 vaccine at cost for the duration of the pandemic, is facing global pressure to boost supply. It had planned to provide 180 million doses to the EU in the second quarter but will only deliver 40 million.

The British-Swedish company also told the Morrison government in January that it could only provide 1.2 million offshore doses in February and March instead of the expected 3.8 million. Only 717,000 doses – the ones from the UK – have arrived so far, leaving 3.1 million doses in the balance.
https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/...07-p57hcl.html