The great hope of Australia's vaccine strategy was the University of Queensland's "Molecular Clamp". Unfortunately the clamp molecule, derived from part of the AIDS virus, triggered false positives in AIDS tests. They used that particular molecule as it was available and time scales were tight. A revised version is being developed with a new clamp molecule, but it won't be ready for the current round of vaccinations.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2021-04-26/university-que...

Are false positive HIV tests really such a problem? I think most elderly patients wouldn't be concerned about that.

Where Australia really messed up was basically stopping use of AstraZeneca entirely (IIRC).

Blood clot risk is much higher the younger you are[1]. It would have been far better to continue using AstraZeneca, but limit it to a certain age and older.

[1] For example, 1.1 of the specific clots per 100 000 vaccinations of people in their 20s, falling to 0.2 per 100 000 in their 60s. https://wintoncentre.maths.cam.ac.uk/news/communicating-pote...

That's exactly what Australia did, except all of the FUD led to older Australians choosing to forgo AZ due to the perceived risk.

Ah, didn't realise. Good they didn't ban it, but then that's still a clear failure of public health messaging. In exchange for falling behind on vaccination, Australia had some rather strict lockdowns (especially for the post-vaccine stage of the pandemic).

I’m in my 30s and had AZ. It certainly wasn’t banned.

Until recently it was the only vaccine available for over 60s even.

Also FWIW. The risk of blood clots seems to be significantly higher in women than men. I think they should have focused on giving AZ to men and Pfizer to younger women.

For a while though some states were giving Pfizer to men in their 40s and 50s working from home, while recommending young women go and get dosed with AZ.

Clots when young are much fun. Having a unknown clotting disorder really screwed me up

Yeah, sorry, doesn't sound like fun.