We know what we know, and will base our information and our timetables on that rather than speculating.” The timetable should have been clear: by then, Morrison and his ministers had already made half a dozen announcements about their vaccine acquisitions, boasting of tens of millions of doses. On January 7, he held a press conference at which he humbly informed Australians that, “We don’t want to make promises that we can’t keep … We will tell you timetables when we can have confidence in those timetables, and we will continue to update those timetables as more information is known and as improvements continue to be made. It was neither the first nor last time during the pandemic. Yet again, Morrison was simply making stuff up to cover his change of course. Both the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines had been approved by February, well before he took his “not a race” line for a few laps around the press gallery. I’m not sure if people are aware of that.” But he wasn’t. “When we made those remarks,” he claimed, “we were talking about the regulation of the vaccines. Two months later, he first uttered the infamous phrase that the vaccine rollout “is not a race”, a line he repeated three times that month.īut by July, he hadn’t just changed his mind, he wanted us to change our memories as well. In January this year, the second year of the pandemic, the prime minister was urging us to hasten slowly when it came to vaccination. Lest there be any doubt about his priorities at that time, the story opened with the calming words, “Prime Minister Scott Morrison has warned it would be dangerous to rush a coronavirus vaccination rollout even if it could lead to restrictions and border closures easing sooner.” The front page of The Sydney Morning Herald cried, “Vaccine can wait, says PM”. Scott Morrison’s New Year’s message to Australians couldn’t have been clearer. ![]() ![]() The federal government’s handling of the pandemic has been the worst public policy screw-up in Australian history
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