Qantas vaccine. IATA Health Passport.
 

https://www.flightglobal.com/strateg...141248.article

It’s the old ‘only mandatory if you want to do X......’ policy.

Reduced travel/reduced tourism was one of the repeated stated aims of the green push we’ve been bombarded with the past few decades.

This will no doubt help. Initially. To reduce passenger numbers and show reduced carbon emissions and everyone involved can pat themselves on the back. Until other industries follow suit and say you don’t have to have the vaccine(s), you just have to have them to use our service/company.

This will be a very emotive and dividing issue for societies now. You either believe nobody has a right to refuse a vaccine for this (Covid) or any alleged communicable disease or you believe nobody has a right to dictate what you do to your body. Largely like we see in democratic countries currently.

If you’re largely in favour of this Qantas idea, I’d ask, is there anything you’d stop at/not accept on a personal level? If there is something that’s ‘off limits’ personally, as it were, how sure are you societies will agree with you and support you when that point is reached? Perhaps now is the time to say No.

I understand that some wouldn’t want to be at the very front of the line, but save for a medical prohibition, why would anyone not want to get this vaccine?

I won’t link dump here but will recommend researching Pandemrix/GSK/Swine Flu/Narcolepsy.

Covid and Swine are both corona viruses.
Same pandemic type wording, global media coverage, transmission vectors, mitigation type aids like masks, distancing, washing hands, etc.

Taking the position of ‘waiting to see’ is a bit of a falsehood. It doesn’t address the problem.
And also assumes any side effects will occur before you take yours. What if it takes 3 years instead of 2 to witness the full effects? Or 4 years instead of 3. Have they tested the multiple vaccines created so far against use with other drugs? No combined effects?

I’m sure many of us here are commuters. Where do these fall? You need a vaccine cert to travel as a pax but when then clocking on as active crew, there’s no need to show it as crew are exempt? It’s but a small example of how broad brush this Qantas policy is and if Joyce is to believed, many airlines will follow suit. Maybe OneWorld have already agreed to implement within the Group.

From Lockdown Sceptics in the UK, re. the Quantas decision:
'Bit rash. The drug companies are exempt from liability if a vaccine turns out to have a harmful side effect, but not airlines. What if someone only gets vaccinated in order to fly on Qantas and then suffers serious harm? Maybe moot because Qantas could be out of business by then.'
Personally I don't think Quantas will have a problem because I'm expecting governments around the world to mandate both the vaccine and some kind of "Freedom Pass". Consequently I am about half way through arranging my personal affairs so that I will never have to fly or use public transport again.

Check Airman

Apparently, a vaccine takes 5 to 10 years to be brought to market. Because governments are indemnifying the drug companies, long term trials have not been completed. In essence, those vaccinated are the long term trial.

It's not a unique situation. From some decades ago until present days, many countries have always had a requirement for any entrant or visa applicant to have certain vaccines. In many other countries, certain vaccines are mandatory for children to attend school. Some vaccines or proof of being free of certain communicable diseases are also among the requirements to apply for citizenship or a residence permit in many countries. The COVID one will be just another one, not something unique and unprecedented.

Thanks.

I think a good chunk of this issue/debate, etc is whether you believe Covid and all
its case numbers and hospitalisations justify company/country imposed vaccines.

In the U.K. alone, a Covid death is any death of someone who had tested positive within the previous 28 days. Regardless of why they died.

That’s a far cry from the scenes we were shown in early 2020 of people
either keeling over in China or Italian in-patients gasping for breath on ventilators. For some reason we’re not shown these things anymore. Yet the numbers, you’d be forgiven for thinking, are the same, in this second lockdown period.

Are flu deaths less valuable? Plenty an old person would’ve contracted influenza from someone in their family meeting someone else, maskless and succumbed to it in time. So it (this apparent need to stipulate Covid vaccines) can’t be total annual Covid death number related.

I go back to a point I made in my first post; if you’re happy with all this Covid vaccines stuff, the numbers reported, the solutions, restrictions etc, where is your limit? Do we really have none then? Is it a case of meh, some schools need vaccines, some citizenship applications need them, so roll
on required Covid vaccines.......?

The people who take the Covid vaccine will be simply continuing the safety trials of the past few months, like a previous poster said.

Capt Scribble

I’m no expert on the matter, so I’m willing to be corrected.

The unprecedented speed at which these vaccines are being developed is because the relevant parts of the scientific community have effectively dropped everything, and put all their resources into it. A truly global effort.

It’s my understanding that no vaccine or medication undergoes “long term trials” until it’s been released- by definition. This is the “Phase 4”. Ideal as it would be, we can’t very well wait 5, 10 or 15 years to see what may (or may not) happen with this one, can we?

Between Pfizer and Moderna, some 75-80,000 people have selflessly been tested. No doubt the Oxford vaccine will bring that number to over 100,000. If the scientists and doctors around the world review the data and are happy enough to take it themselves, I trust their expertise.

Check Airman

Here's the thing: vaccines are not 100% safe. The argument that the benefits out-weight the cost is not ethical, as in reality it is saying: it is acceptable to either kill or severely cripple few for the benefit of the many.

In essence it comes down to this: vaccines are a giant russian roulette. We don't know exactly what the odds are, but even if we say they are 1 in a million, we are knowingly killing people in order to save other people.

Would you pull the trigger of that gun against your kid, even if it would mean they were supposedly safe against something else in return? Would you really? I think most people would not. Something abut the gun makes the danger perceivable, where as "1 in a million" against injection sounds more assuring, but it is not.

The 10 years to develop a drug versus 1 year in the case of Covid is a load of B.S.
A lots of the "10 years" is spent with spinning wheels, when nothing is actually done other than pleading for money/resources/lab time/getting volunteers and so on.
Covid money, 100,000s of volunteers, and pre-existing research in to Spike - type infections has radically cut down the time required.

As to the anti-vax comments on here. Good. You won't have it. That moves my children up in the queue.

AO, your children are welcome to my dose. I shall risk catching the virus itself and gaining immunity that way. I might die, but its more likely that I will not. Calling people anti-vaxers merely shows you do not accept differing opinions to your own.

Scary stuff..,, the end is naigh for aviation?! Green brigade won

sprite1

Not liking the situation we find ourselves in and denying it are total different. Im the former, certainly not the latter. As for the whole "All these people could be getting hit by a bus and they call it covid...etc...." Just how many people do you think die on a day to day basis? Id wager that if you die with a positive covid test, chances are you died from covid or it certainly contributed...very very few people die from accidents or out of the blue so can we just drop that line now? It may be comforting but it's just ridiculous.

Imagine a passenger coming up to the flight deck and commenting on your fuel decision because they had "done their own research"? You'd be aghast and offended that someone thinks they could do your job because they did a bit of reading on the internet. Why do so many people think that they can have an opinion of covid (irony alert, I know)?

Covid is a real danger to enough people to shut down the global economy. Science has provided a way out. Im taking it. Plus it might save my job and tens of thousands of fellow pilots, cabin crew, engineers and in the vast chain that flows from aviation. Choosing not to take a vaccine is your right and should not be infringed upon but that doesn't mean you have the right to do everything you may want to do yourself.

Actions have consequences.

In Germany autopsies have shown that 86% of "corona deaths" were due to COVID and not due to other reasons.

Capt Scribble

It appears from recent reports that one does not gain immunity after catching the virus.

derjodel

I just looked and couldn't find a single case of death due a vaccine since 1955 when a bad bad batch of Polio vaccine came out. Im sure there has been a death from a vaccine reaction but it doesn't seem to happen often.

Would I risk my child to save millions of others? Yes I would. Nobody seems to remember the 10,000 babies that died a year from whooping cough (pertussis) or the thousands crippled by Polio.

Go back to reading anti vax literature.

Anti body formation may not be strong and fades, which is the root of the reports LT mentions. It will be the 'T' cells formed that provide a defense to the virus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_cell

Climb150

It is tragic when reasonable people are unable to argue on facts and resort to shaming as some kind of supposedly intelligent discussion.

You can search VAERS for deaths. It's 35 reported deaths in 2020 and 1699 serious reported cases in 2020. Is it in your interest to label someone who is interested in what is behind that data as "anti-vaxxer"?

There is also something else interesting going on. We do not know if it's related to vaccines or not, but it certainly is worth looking into. Or are our kids better off labelling this MD an "anti-vaxxer"?

You are free to do what is best for your kid. However, neither you, nor anybody else should be able to tell me that I must vaccinate my kids. It is my responsibility to weight the risks and accept the consequences. And no, it is not my duty to vaccinate my kid to protect others, as that clearly means I subject my kid to potential injury in order to protect others.

PS: the effectiveness of the whooping cough vaccines appears to decrease by between 2 and 10% per year after vaccination. In essence, if you are not re-vaccinating every few years, you have no protection and you are a danger to others. On another topic this is an interesting paper on treating it, but to my knowledge it was never properly studied, which is really sad.

As to the testing regime of these vaccines, I can’t speak for Pfizer or Moderna, but Oxford for years have been researching for “Disease X” - a global pathogen that would severely risk the health of the worlds population. And then voila, come New Years Eve 2019, whilst we’re all on the piss, this pops up.

They had also researched the original SARS pathogen and had developed a vaccine for Ebola and were attending to crack the code for MERS, which people forget is still relatively prevalent in the Middle East.

The 5-10 year development cycle is typically taken up by research (they already had the genetic code supplied by the Chinese) and when they have a vaccine ready to go for approval, it sits on someone’s desk for years. Clearly the regulators were unable to sit on this for ages and have been doing their assessments in parallel.

Oxford and others are amongst the finest medical minds on the globe. You know better than them?

And you object to be labelled an ‘anti-vaxxer’? Why? Your claims are straight out of the anti-vax playbook, you are clearly anti vaccine. Do you think your views are special or that you’ve said anything that an ordinary anti-vaxxer doesn’t espouse?

I’m not ashamed to be characterised as a sheep by the anti-vax crowd. I have no medical expertise, and I don’t pretend I can become a medical expert by selective googling from my comfortable chair. To believe otherwise is arrogant and ignorant.

Who said either I or my kids are not vaccinated? I only stated that It should, no, must be my choice alone.

The "I'm no medical expert" argument is a red herring. To understand potential cause and effect one must understand data. To explain how that effect works, one must be a medical expert. I have some background in statistics. Experience has unfortunately showed me that my understanding of statistics and probability is superior to that of an average MD. Worse, I had a (non-vaccine) related medical emergency where my kid could have died if I didn't catch the doctor's mistake in the treatment (they prescribed too low dose for the kid's weight). So yeah, trust, but verify.

The real problem is, understanding stats means understanding that there is no safe choice. There are only different risks, with different probabilities (sometimes hard do assess due to lack of good quality data). Making that choice is terrifying.

Isn't it a bit strange for an airline to make that decision?
If Australia mandates vaccination as a prerequisite to entry so be it. But the airline ?
In any case we are still very, very early in the process. Even if those miracle (both in terms of efficiency and time to market) vaccine deliver the logistics are quite complex...

I'm going to have to reread this whole thread . . . here, I had been given to understand that, once not so long ago, polio was a dread disease which medical science and good medical practice alike were essentially powerless to stop or to cure. Then a vaccine was found, and administered widely. If there are unwanted adverse events from the vaccine, it has been said that medical science is not perfect - nothing human is - but the dread disease was conquered, except for very statistically rare instances of proof of the noted imperfection. But Russian Roulette is the comparison, eh? Better get rereading, then.....

The fact is, Qantas have decided to go for it . They might be seen as the trailblazer for all others. Based on what? Media hype?

what has this world come to.

It’s going to be a combination of old and new, I think. Old, in that to access various countries you’re going to have to provide proof of vaccination and probably have a test for CV-19 as well, like for Yellow Fever and similar pathogens (minus the test). New, in that carriers may start to insist on the same due to public demand - wouldn’t it be nice on a long flight to know that everyone on board had been vaccinated?

For Covid to reduce to background annoyance level, we need herd immunity, through exposure (illness/death) and/or vaccines. Which would most people prefer and which will get the World back on its feet in the shortest time frame?

Re the argument that to fly internationally you are vaccinated for other diseases, true but this one is rushed in for profit.

The crews are also the early guinea pigs. Nice gamble with your medicals.

I'm not sure QF would be legally allowed to do this as a condition of carriage, it sounds like discrimination. A government could impose a requirement on health grounds but that is a totally different thing.

Regardless, this is an aviation forum so most of you should understand the concept of not buying the "A Model" of anything.

I do not know anyone that is fundamentally opposed to vaccinations but I also don't know anyone that will be rushing to get this particular vaccination. It is also worth noting that there are several competing vaccines and some will work better than others and some will possibly do more harm than others.

How many vaccinations were administered in that time? I tried but couldn't find that number.

I think if you check the number of babies born that year, it’ll give you a reasonably good estimate of the number of people vaccinated.

Someone mentioned that a one in a million risk of serious side effects should be enough of a deterrent against a vaccine. Let's suppose that you decide to take the natural course of things instead and get infected (quite often unknowingly). What's your chance of developing serious complications or dying? Even if actual COVID-19 case numbers globally have been underestimated by a factor or 10, it will perhaps still be greater than one in a million. So, no completely risk-free, gamble-free solution here.

No vaccine, stay home.
It’s a free world, but you don’t have the right to transmit this disease to those who can’t take the vaccine for medical reasons.
That goes for workers who deal with other humans as well. That is us, and our cabin staff.
Your unvaccinated kids can stay home from school.
It will that much longer to get rid of Covid when people refuse the vaccine, but those who do can stay at home. With no support from the governments.

Theyre not just throwing the vaccines out there to see what happens.
The speed at which they’ve been developed is more a reflection of the concentration of effort than not respecting the need for safety.

I know plenty of anti-vaxers (north Coast NSW). Many are just scientifically illiterate and the ‘anti-vax’ message appeals because they just know they’re special, but there’s a hard core of activists who wilfully stoke the fear, distort the truth and flat out lie.

This vaccine and the controversy around it is a gift to these dangerous idiots.

Get over it people.
This really just back to the future.
I’ve still got my little yellow book from the 60s showing that I had been vaccinated against Smallpox, Yellow Fever etc.
It was a requirement across the world.
Should never have been dropped in the first place.
My father worked for the WHO and saw the last case of Smallpox.Vaccines work.
Anti-Vaxers can knock themselves out. This is going to be the knew normal.

dartman2

Governments have passed laws discriminating against the unvaccinated, No Jab No Play. It probably wouldn’t be a stretch to see the legislation expanded to allow airlines to deny carriage to unvaccinated passengers.

indigopete

Well, here you go:

https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid

The coronavirus pandemic has caused nearly 300,000 more deaths than expected in a typical year

My understanding is that the Covid vaccines currently available measure the effectiveness by whether people who have received the vaccine exhibit symptoms of Covid at a later date - whether coughing/loss of smell or some other measure. I have yet to see anything which shows that a person who has had a vaccine is not infectious (or minimally infectious) - and the drug firms all seem to say "we have no data" when asked how a vaccine affects infectiousness
Thus, if every passenger on an aeroplane has had the vaccine, we can claim only that (almost) nobody will show symptoms of Covid - i.e. no coughing fits. I don't see how we can claim that passengers are not infectious. We therefore seem to be sweeping the problem under the carpet because nobody *appears* ill instead of knowing if pax are infectious.

The purpose of "PCR test on arrival" or quarantine is to find out who is infectious and ensure arriving pax will not spread the disease to residents of the country of arrival. I don't see how this "no vaccine, no fly" rule would help either passengers or citizens of the arrival country since it would not be possible to make any claim that the arriving passengers are not infectious. The "no vaccine, no fly" rule seems to be about building confidence in passengers to buy tickets to fly (and boosting airline revenues) because nobody on the aircraft will appear ill and thus passengers perceive themselves to be safe. A person who picks up Covid would find it extremely difficult to prove they were infected by another passenger on a specific flight as opposed to somewhere else

If there is evidence that the vaccine significantly reduces the level of infectiousness, then there is a much stronger argument for requiring all pax to be vaccinated. However, I haven't see that evidence. Has anybody else ?

JustinHeywood

I'm not sure that I understand your point. Only true nut jobs are anti vaccination but lots of people will approach any of the potential vaccinations for Wuflu with caution.

Another thing worth noting, there are several potential vaccines and they work differently. How would one (layman) decide which one to have? The cheapest? The one the media or Government suggest?
Many people will sit on their hands for a while on this.

davidjohnson6

I believe the evidence you seek (rightfully so) should be available in the coming weeks, from Pfizer and Moderna.

No objection to having the vaccine if it allows me to resume my weekly international commute.

Not so sure about the veracity of a “Health passport” issued in some jurisdictions though.
Just another fake thing you’ll be able to buy in Shenzhen and Sham Shui Po as soon as they have a real one to copy I guess.

dartman2

If only there were people who were trained in understanding the different vaccines and how each affects a given individual, so as to best advise said individual...