Looks like they fear they're going to fail to control the recent outbreak.
A statement from the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) in response to the NSW COVID-19 outbreak.
www.health.gov.au
Don't get me started on ATAGI ... One of the big vax issues here is people really not wanting the AZ shot but we don't have enough Pfizer. There was a big misguided AZ-is-crap campaign by influential people who should be spanked for it, and it really wasn't helped by ATAGI saying "Pfizer is preferred for under 60 year-olds oops make that under 50 year olds" - which people interpreted as official confirmation of the AZ-is-crap position. It's not completely irrational - eg so far this year a slightly bigger handful of people have died from AZ clots than have died from COVID - but there just isn't very much Pfizer around and on any kind of numerate assessment of the risks, you really want to take whatever vaccine you can get.
That's what ATAGI should have done at the beginning: eg pointed out that eventually, everybody either gets vaccinated or gets COVID; no matter what age you are, when you get COVID your chances of death are probably greater than your chances of dying from an AZ shot; by the time an outbreak actually happens it'll probably be too late; and given the leakines of quarantine and the rise of much more transmissable variants, an outbreak at any time is a quite possible.
Instead we have this series of changing positions from ATAGI which people can suspect are politically driven and in any case can make ATAGI look irrelevant. Perhaps the problem once again is committees which are too big & too dominated by academics; or more abstractly, the tension between EBM and the precautionary principle; or something
🙂
Anyway, the outbreak in NSW isn't because of "reliance on lockdowns" - they're the state which has prided itself on relying on excellent TTI rather than lockdowns. It seems pretty clear that they got sideswiped by how transmissable delta is, were too slow to lockdown & they still haven't gone hard enough. The state govt seems a bit panicked by the failure of their "gold standard" playbook, but their public health people aren't & there's no way that the rest of the country is going to let them abandon a zero-COVID policy, as far I can see. They need to screw down more and it may take a couple of months.
By contrast, we in SA are coming to the end of a 7 day lockdown caused by a leak from Sydney. As soon as a case was detected in the community, a hard lockdown and mask mandate went into effect everywhere in the state. The index case caused a couple of superspread events but not before contacts and contacts of contacts were quickly isolated & everybody infected was in isolation or quarantine by the time they became infectious; and the thing appears to have been contained. With delta, a day's delay could have made a big difference. Victoria has dealt with their Sydney leak similarly.
Obviously this isn't sustainable forever but unless public attitudes change hugely I think there's no way that Oz would abandon zero-COVID-whatever-it-takes until vax rates are way above eg where the UK is now, so not until early next year, probably.
