2 May

From today (actually I think from 17 May in NSW) people aged 50+ can get an AZ jab. Lots of expertise in the news this morning telling everybody this is a 'safe' vaccine, and that the 'benefits outweigh the risks'. Now I'm the exact opposite of an anti-vaxxer, I think vaccines are superb things. But I find how this is being dealt with fundamentally dishonest. The risk maths is rubbish (making individual risk the same as population risk), the whole problem is being framed in ways that favour economics rather than public health. As I've posted here a few times, we have no idea which individuals will be impacted by this vaccine. But we know some will - 41 now dead in the UK. 41! Educated people will say "yes, but that's out of X million jabs!" If Panadol killed 41 people a year, out of tens of millions of doses, would it still be on the shelves? Of course not. The bar for risk is being set deliberately very low here, out of an abundance of haste (contrasting with the 'abundance of caution' being used in the pandemic to date). There are other vaccines, there are other public health measures that can continue to be used to keep virus out of circulation. The only justification for continuing with this known risk in Australia is haste to get the borders open again, and to scale back the other public health measures, which are seen as expensive and onerous. To get back to 'normal'. I'll be interested if those over 50s will play along here, or whether they will (rightly) expect the government to work a lot harder for their benefit.