Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "When Will Lockdowns End?" with Dr Stephen Duckett

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"When Will Lockdowns End?" with Dr Stephen Duckett · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  get a humans, how you're doing, how you're holding up, you're hanging in there. I'm pretty pretty
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  pretty good. You may have heard my recent rant about lockdowns and vaccinations. One is the
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  beginning of the James Matheson. The other is a bonus episode entitled Something Like a Lockdown
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  rant. Listen to those before you end of this episode or if you don't want to hear them on your
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  podcast feed, you can also find them on Instagram where they exist as little audiogram tiles on my
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  Instagram page. Because this is the fact check of my own random whimsy instead of just spewing
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  barely thought through opinions at you out of my bum hole. I thought it might be worth getting
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  somebody who actually knows what they're talking about to fact check me and make sure that I'm
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  not getting anything wildly wrong. So we track down just the man to do it. Stephen Duckett is
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  an extremely knowledgeable health economist. He's held top policy leadership positions in health
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  care in Australia and also in Canada. He was the secretary of the health department in Australia
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  which is a public service position. It's not an elected political position secretary in Australia.
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  Unlike in America, basically the most senior public servants of the department who they're responsible
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  for the day to day running of the department. So that's all a long roundabout way of saying that
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  he's actually a he's a genuine expert rather than a political stooge who just runs department.
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  In fact, he he went to Canada and he ran the province of Alberta's health system for a while.
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  Then he came back here and now he works at the Grant Institute which is a think tank. They had
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  a big impact on Australia's response to COVID-19. They kicked off the national conversation
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  among other institutions about shutting down hard and fast and eliminating community transmission.
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  So they've always been sort of on I suppose the other side of where I find myself on this debate.
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  Now I don't really want to take sides about it because for a very long time I was extremely
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  pro lockdown and very proud of Australia's response. I was on the fifth column podcast with my
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  buddies in the States last year and was was crowing. Now I perhaps after eat a bit of humble pie
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  about that, crowing about the success of Australia's lockdown. But it still it still stands up that
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  Sydney did have 13 months of glorious and total freedom. We were going to concerts and going to
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  the theatre and living normal lives in what now seems like a parallel universe fantasy land of
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  COVID freedom. I suppose it doesn't feel like a fantasy land if you're in any state other than
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  New South Wales or Victoria because in Western Australia as you're here in this conversation with
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  Stephen, they are still out raging and going to sporting events and going to cafes and going
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  to restaurants and all that sort of stuff without the consequences of such behaviour in the US or UK
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  which is skyrocketing rates of infection and hospitalizations and death in some of the less
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  vaccinated states of the US. So West Australia currently has the best of all worlds. It is free
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  and also free of COVID. But what it is not free to do is connect with the outside world, is connect
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  with the rest of the country, connect with other countries. And that's a situation that West
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  Australia is currently like. But as you will know, if you've been listening to my previous rant,
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  it is not a sustainable situation. And since it's not a situation that any people in Sydney can look
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  forward to at any point in the future, since we now find ourselves in a scenario in which we are
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  living with coronavirus like it or not, my desire is to understand how we begin to accept the
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  pathogen as endemic and not overwhelm our healthcare system but also not keep cycling in and out
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  of these insane lockdowns. Like how much freedom can we get and how soon? Stephen is the man who
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  knows, he crunches the numbers, he understands all of this. So I hope this is as informative for
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  you as it was for me to speak with the one and only. I didn't mention what his actual job is because
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  his actual job is that he is the health and age care program director at the Grapness Institute.
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  Please enjoy Dr. Stephen Duckett.
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  I would have been ranting a little bit lately on the show about my frustrations with
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  pace of vaccinations and with the language and rhetoric and thinking about lockdowns and my
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  I suppose my suspicion or my fear that the devil is going to be in the details about what opening
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  up will mean and that there will always be excuses for Western Australia or Tasmania to
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  keep kicking the can down the road. But why don't you start by maybe just giving us a snapshot
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  of where you see things. I just read your piece in the age from two days ago about what Victoria
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  should do. Where are we? So Australia has been behind on a vaccine rollout right from the start.
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  We started in February and of this year and on the day we started I think the United States had
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  already vaccinated something like 55 million people. So we are very very slow. Now
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  and that obviously method right at the start I suppose it didn't matter if we didn't start exactly
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  the same day as everybody else but what what was the problem is we started late and we are very very
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  slow. So our vaccination rate is nowhere near where it ought to be by now principally because of
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  lack of supply. The lack of supply should be fixed next month or in October rather but at the
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  moment we're still very you know on on the lowest side in the world in a sense other than in
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  very low income countries. Well defenders of the government who and I've been very critical of
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  the government's vaccine rollout too but it's defenders will say well in comparison to other
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  countries that didn't have rampant virulent pandemics internally we're not doing we didn't do
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  too badly. So compared to Taiwan and Japan and New Zealand our rollout wasn't slow it was only
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  slow because we didn't we weren't allocated the same quantity of vaccines that you would expect
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  to be allocated to a to a country where it was a medical emergency. You don't buy that?
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  I don't think it's a good look if you have to pick and choose who you're going to actually
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  compete yourself with. The reality is we made the wrong choices in what vaccines would buy back in
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  June and because of that and because two of those vaccine choices we made fell over either completely
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  or half we're in a bad situation now and I think that's the reality. What were those choices
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  Stephen back in the middle of last year? Back in June or middle of last year most other countries
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  and the advice given by the highly paid external consultants to the Commonwealth was that most
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  other countries are investing in a range of vaccines because we didn't know which vaccines
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  were going to work and so we wanted to all the other countries were hedging our beds. Australia
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  invested in a vaccine developed by the University of Queensland which was going to be made by CSL
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  that completely fell over during clinical trials and the second one they invested in was AstraZeneca
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  to be made by CSL and that then had problems of vaccine acceptance really. Because of the
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  the rare blood clotting issue. Because of the rare blood clotting issue and the way in which
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  the announcements about that were sold to the public. So it could have been the case that when
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  the relevant committee made the decision the government could have said we are making sure that
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  this vaccine is only used when it is safe and really sold it as a positive but unfortunately
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  it was not sold as a positive and everybody you know we ended up with a whole lot of people
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  who could well have taken and what could well have used AstraZeneca that unfortunately they didn't.
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  Yeah and it also suffered a bit from early confusion over what the results of the clinical trials
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  were about its effectiveness as well I think it was always sort of mischaracterized in the media as
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  being significantly less effective than Pfizer. Exactly and that is just not the case.
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  The effectiveness of AstraZeneca in preventing deaths and preventing hospitalisation is almost
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  identical to Pfizer I think there's one or two percent difference. Steven what did you make of the
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  government's sort of approach towards vaccines in June, July, August, September of last year?
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  I mean you know at the time that they were meeting with Pfizer I was looking at the dates at which
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  other countries got their Pfizer orders in and every other Anglophone democracy was sort of you
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  know in July they had their orders in I think Canada was the last cab off the rank on August 5th they
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  got their order in for for Pfizer and we had this meeting here between the Australian government and
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  Pfizer where which there are some reports it went very poorly and Pfizer was not terribly impressed
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  and went away and we came back cap in hand in I think was it November or October much much much
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  later begging for some Pfizer at which point we weren't able to get an allocation that was adequate.
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  I would have thought that at the time I mean we were the government was spending so much on
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  JobKeeper that you could have thrown all the money in the world at every possible vaccine and it
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  would have been a drop in the bucket in terms of what you were spending every week on JobKeeper to
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  keep the economy going and that clearly wasn't the thinking why do you think it wasn't?
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  So it's very important that this is not with the wisdom of hindsight because at the time people
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  were saying you should invest in a range of vaccines both external commentators people at the
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  University of New South Wales were making that argument at the time the consultants to the Commonwealth
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  were making had showed what every other country was doing so as I said this is not in the wisdom
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  of hindsight at the time they should have known to invest in a range however what they were I think
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  there were we don't know the answers so this is speculation I think there were two things going
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  at the same time one is the mRNA vaccines such as Pfizer were new science relatively and I think
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  they were the Commonwealth was relatively cautious about banking on a vaccine that they we didn't
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  know was going to work at the time whereas other countries did the second thing was they were
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  really keen to support Australia both in manufacturing and in development so that's why I think
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  they went with the University of Queensland vaccine that's why they emphasized the ability
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  for the vaccine to be manufactured in Australia and by making that call it meant it had to more
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  or less be an old technology vaccine rather than a new technology vaccine right because we just
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  don't have the ability to manufacture mRNA vaccines in Australia well it would take a long time to
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  develop that capacity that is more than six months two hour non-Australian listeners can you
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  explain as best you can why it seems like we are so hysterical by global standards at the moment
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  we have a lot of a lot of listeners in the states who I hear from on Twitter saying I thought
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  the Australians were rugged individualists and resilient and the rest of the world is getting on
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  with life by now and is over it and you've got 60 cases in Victoria and you can't go outside
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  your house after 9pm what's going on yeah so I think we have to look back to 2020 when Australia
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  looked at the disasters happening in Europe especially and the Italian situation and we said we do
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  not want to have a world where there's hospitals being overwhelmed and so on so surprisingly
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  the states all of the states went for a essentially a zero COVID strategy they and especially
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  Victoria when the virus escaped mid-year 2020 they basically closed Victoria down for 110 days
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  and just to clarify for non-Australians the reason you're talking about the states is because like
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  the US we are a federation of states and so our health care systems are governed by state
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  governments rather than by the federal government as is the case in some other some other democracy
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  so yeah so so there was actually a war between the Commonwealth and the states on this very issue
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  that fit the national government and the states the national government didn't want to close down
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  but the states had the power under the constitution to make public health orders and the like
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  and so they did and early in the pandemic Tasmania closed as borders to other to people from
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  other states to Western Australia closed their borders the Commonwealth was opposed to that as well
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  so there's been different policies at play that basically for most of 2020 the the public was
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  supporting a COVID-zero approach despite the Commonwealth and the national government being
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  opposed to it and this slipped over and then of course we then saw the benefits of the COVID-zero
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  once we'd achieved COVID-zero we could have large gatherings without risks and and so we had a
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  a risk-three life and that is just to interject to be fair to the the federal government the national
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  government they did ban any foreigners from coming to Australia and they required all returning
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  Australians to be incarcerated for two weeks in makeshift quarantine hotels which enabled the states
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  the state lockdowns to be insulated from any incoming cases so once they were contact traced
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  and isolated in the community a state like New South Wales was able to use a fairly short lockdown of