How will the vaccine crisis affect border openings?

No one can dare say that Australian’s will be able to travel overseas either by October 2021 or early 2022.

After the recent vaccine blow with Astra Zeneca now only recommended in Australia for people over 50 and Pfizer becoming the preferred vaccine for under 50m the waiting time to secure the 20 million doses that Australia has ordered will mean the jeopardy of the government plan to immunise most of the population by October has blown out the window.

The PM and Health Minister plainly refuse to provide any timeline or a revised vaccination plan, after the original plan which had the AstraZeneca vaccine as their workhorse became void.

Our government Infectious Diseases Physician Dr Coatsworth today said emerging challenges such as new vaccine advice and supply issues had hindered the rollout schedule.

But he suggested the mass vaccination rollout was unchartered territory and the government was not necessarily to blame for the roadblocks. Well, Dr Coatsworth, that is not quite accurate, the government is to blame because it chose to have only one workhorse with the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine. If more vaccines would have been taken into consideration, today we wouldn’t be walking on unchartered territories.

The issue is that our senior politicians were never thought of the concept of “never put all your eggs in one basket”! Essentially that is what our government did!

The most curious part of this AstraZeneca vaccine dilemma is that Australia seems to stand on its own with our rule set by our medical board that the AstraZeneca vaccine can be given to people over 50, whilst most European “those still using the vaccine” have set the age limit to over 60’s. As ambiguous as this whole thing sounds there is a 10-year gap as well as there is no thorough explanation as to why the blood clot issue will not develop in an individual over 50.

The most important part that has been totally neglected by the group of our medical Illuminati is “what about people over 50 with hindering medical conditions?” there are people that are forced to take blood-thinning medication and people with conditions that tend to make their blood a little thicker than normal. I am not a Doctor, but I would assume that the AstraZeneca vaccine could be fatal for those people. Not a single word has been said about vulnerable categories over ’50s.

More and more countries are either opening or planning to open up within the next 2-4 months, as vaccination makes progress in the US and in Europe, whilst in Australia looks like we will need to get used to the idea of further exploring our back yard until the “other vaccine” is delivered and the government sets a realist date to open the international borders.

Meanwhile, the Federal Government has tasked an expert medical committee to determine the feasibility of allowing vaccinated Australians to travel overseas.

The Australian Health Protection Principal Committee (AHPPC) would inform the government about the risk profile and timelines of allowing such travel to take place. “The AHPPC will look into the potential of Australians who are vaccinated being able to travel overseas and return to Australia and not have to go into hotel quarantine, potentially even going into home isolation.

The committee will also be charged with investigating the potential of travelling to other ‘low risk’ nations with similar vaccine arrangements, however, PM Morrison was quick to qualify that these types of decisions won’t be made overnight.

The potential for those delays to impact Australia’s long-awaited emergence from COVID-19 restrictions and border closures, Qantas may have to re-think the planned re-start of international travel set for October. The restart of the suffering travel industry will be put further in jeopardy with this unplanned surprise.