Our excess deaths were extremely low while the rest of the west were letting it rip in 2020~2021. Most people I know in Australia have only recently gotten covid for the first time.

>the rest of the west were letting it rip in 2020~2021

That's funny. As restrictions started to lift during 2021 (UK/Wales), some complained that the government was now letting it rip. Just shows - anyone more cautious than you is needlessly scared, and anyone less cautious is an idiot.

Indeed. But isn't Australia one of the most vaccinated countries? Australia wanted to lockdown until they could vaccinate virtually everyone. With 97.3% [0] of people aged 16+ with at least 1 dose they can claim "Mission accomplished" on that front.

[0] https://www.health.gov.au/our-work/covid-19-vaccines/vaccina...

How do you square these two things?

Some extra info: Aussies got vaccinated relatively easily on, but the protection gets weaker with time. This + barely about announcements about new vaccines / second booster (14M>5M drop) + new strains which are more resistant to the original vaccines are definitely messing up the numbers this year compared to the previous.

We're taking now with the benefit of knowing the future. The lockdowns kept the numbers low for a long time and vaccination kept the original strains away as well by the time we did the "mission success".

The "original strain" was already gone by the time Australia started vaccinating.

Input Australia on https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations and have a look for yourself.

Then again, we were always behind each and every variant, always following our tail when it came to it.

Unfortunate phrasing, i meant the pre-omicron strains rather than original, since that's when the effectiveness changed most drastically. Up to and including Delta we still got 95+% effectiveness against hospitalisation (https://www.health.gov.au/our-work/covid-19-vaccines/advice-...) and the omicron did not hit until late Dec '21. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/datablog/2021/dec/23/how-m...)

By December we were already just doing the long tail of vaccinations getting to that 95% in Feb (https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/datablog/ng-inter...) So while I agree we had issues with the rollout, I don't agree "we were always behind each and every variant".

That's ok. Big pharma still gets paid for every jab, regardless if it actually works.

Record profits for Pfizer, while nurses got a clap.