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".