Your comment is slightly out of date. The stated position of both the Australian PM and NSW state premier is that elimination is impossible, and vaccination/reopening is the goal.

https://www.9news.com.au/national/coronavirus-update-we-cant...

If that's correct then why have they been so slow to distribute vaccines?

I recognise you may not have the backstory on why this is the case.

Australia relied mainly on AstraZeneca and the UQ molecular clamping vaccine for its vaccine strategy, both of which could be manufactured locally. It signed other contracts for vaccines lackadaisically and with a late delivery time.

AstraZeneca is less effective than mRNA vaccines like Pfizer and Moderna, and causes a rare blood clotting condition that's fatal at a rate of 1 per millions. The UQ molecular clamping vaccine failed clinical trials despite being effective because it caused some patients to return a false positive result for HIV. This meant that domestic vaccine production in Australia was limited to one less effective vaccine that sometimes (very rarely) kills the people who get it, which the media have had a field day with.

The government now faces the problem of having millions of doses of a vaccine that few people want, few doses of the vaccines everyone wants, drug manufacturers who've already signed agreements with everyone else, a low rate of infection (due to lockdowns) that means they don't deserve emergency support, and a population that has no idea what's happening because the situation is complicated.

On top of this, the government has made some bad decisions with the roll-out itself. It doesn't allow the age groups most vulnerable to COVID-19 to receive the marginally safer and significantly more effective mRNA vaccines, on the basis that this age group has a clear benefit from receiving AstraZeneca and a lower risk of blood clotting, so there's significant vaccine hesitancy and less effective vaccine coverage among the very group who's most likely to die from the disease. It also didn't allow young people to receive the AstraZeneca vaccine for a long time, and even now requires them to give informed consent to a doctor or pharmacist before receiving it, so the roll-out requires finding qualified doctors and pharmacists as well as nurses, at a time when the medical system is already strained.

Can't you buy other vaccines?

I live in slovenia, and we're giving vaccines away to other countries (literally), because people don't want to get vaccinated, and the vaccines are nearing the expiry date.

You can choose the vaccine, and can get vaccinated any day, even without signing up.

Yes, that's the obvious solution, and in fact we've bought Pfizer from Poland and cut various other deals. It's unfortunately not quick to do, although in my opinion the government failed to prioritise it as heavily as it should have.

Interesting to see that vaccine idiocy has made it to other countries. American soft power truly is something.

Interesting you think it’s American soft power when it might as well be Russian soft power that is making it to the U.S. south.

That’s the story of how it started.

Australia is a rich country, once this happened they could have paid whatever it takes to get enough Pfeizer/Moderna. The price almost don’t matter, it is so cost effective it’s insane.

If we could figure out the total cost of this pandemic I’m sure all the vaccines we will take over many years will be a fraction of 1% of the total cost and that is not including human suffering and death.

Yep. It costs somewhere on the order of $100 million to $1 billion a week to keep Sydney or Melbourne in lockdown. The costs thus far have vastly exceeded the estimated cost of ordering mRNA vaccine doses for every adult in the country ($780m[0]) or building federal quarantine facilities that don't leak cases (around $200m for a 500 bed facility[1]). It's an astounding leadership failure.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/10/stuffed-how-au...

[1] https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/deal-in-sight-for-20..., and though I have doubts about whether it should cost $400k a bed to build and operate a quarantine facility, it would still be much cheaper than locking down the entire state

For elderly patients at least the risk of HIV infection is minimal so I don't understand why a false positive HIV test would cause a clinical trial to fail. Some cancer therapies also cause false positive HIV tests and that doesn't prevent them being used.

Because the federal government is full of incompetent conservative fuckwits that couldn't organise a root in a brothel and would struggle to win 5% of the vote without decades of the worst Murdoch propaganda behind them that makes Fox News look reasonable.

We have one of the worst governments in the entire democratic world. We just got insanely lucky that at the start of the pandemic they decided to lay off as much responsibility as possible to the state governments who have mostly been fantastic.

This got downvoted for the emotional language, but the facts of the matter are sadly correct.

Incompetent governance.

So their initial strategy turned out impossible to follow, but now they have a new one you trust?

Did they refund the fines of those people who protested or are people still fined and arrested?

you misunderstand the zero covid strategy. The endgame is not zero covid forever. The endgame is zero-covid until we get as many people vaccinated as possible. This is the best result that can be achieved. less deaths, AND less economic disruption.

"They might as well do it now" is misguided. Would you prefer to release a virus into an unvaccinated or fully vaccinated population?

At this point, in the US any adult who wants to be vaccinated, is. But we still have to mask up due to Delta getting past the vaccines, and children not being vaccinated.

in Aus we don't have enough vaccines to give to the people that want them. bad luck on vaccine betting and incompetent government are the main reasons.

Why are they not vaccinated yet? Everyone here in Western Europe has had access by now if they wanted to get vaccinated. Could it be their "strategy" changes every week and isn't a strategy at all?

Bad luck on vaccine betting and incompetent government are the main reasons. Others have elaborated in this thread.

Got a source on the NZ PM saying they can't talk to one another anymore?

"Don't talk to your neighbours." https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/covid-19-coronavirus-children-...

To expand upon your quote:

> "We ask people to stay two metres away from anyone you pass," she said. "Stay local. Do not congregate. Don't talk to your neighbours. Please, keep to your bubble."

To interpret that as anything other than physical distancing measures can only be deliberate obtuseness. You can talk to anyone you want, just pick up the phone.

> New Zealand just shut down everything over a single case

It's maddening to see someone peddling this narrative in a discussion on HN.

No, that's a literal description of what they did last week:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/17/new-zealand-to...

One (1) positive case, entire nation placed on maximum level 4 lockdown where you can't leave your house except for a very short list of permitted reasons.

NZ now has more than 100 cases. I wonder how high it would be now if they didn't.

It's not a literal description of what happened.

Read the article you linked to, not just the headline. It explains the additional factors that informed the decision.

The "1 positive case" narrative is nonsense.

I'm quite well aware of what's happening in NZ, thank you, and the reason they locked down the whole nation is because that one case a) could not be immediately linked to another case, implying there were likely others out there, and b) had moved around quite a bit, meaning other cases were likely widely spread. As we now know both these turned out to be true.

Nevertheless, it is still a literally true statement that the entirety of NZ was locked down over one (1) case, because if they hadn't found that one case, they wouldn't have done that.