‘Australia is my country’: AstraZeneca chief pushed for local vaccine production
"IMPT. all countries - Get guards out of corridors at quarantine hotels and get fresh air and CCTV in – experts"
By Stephen Brook March 5, 2021 — 7.43am
The global head of pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca personally worked to ensure its Oxford University coronavirus vaccine would be made locally because he says Australia is “my country”.
French-born Pascal Soriot, who has been running the global operations of British-Swedish AstraZeneca out of his home on Sydney’s lower north shore and an office next to its manufacturing plant in a Sydney business park, says the vaccine was much more effective than early reports suggested, leading to a 94 per cent reduction in hospitalisations in Britain.
“Has it been perfect? No. But it’s really been a resounding success,” he says.
On Friday, 90 front-line workers in the South Australian town of Murray Bridge were to be the first Australians to receive a dose of the overseas-made AstraZeneca vaccine ahead of 50 million doses being made by Melbourne biotech firm CSL Limited.
[...]
Mr Soriot praised Australia’s “great pragmatism” in instituting lockdowns at a time many in Europe argued such restrictions could work in China but were impossible in a democracy.
“But the fact is, Australia is as democratic as Europe and has been able to do something that works. And they haven’t made it complicated.
“Europe is a great continent but I have to say, people haven’t really done as well as here in terms of managing this pandemic.”
Personally, since Australia is doing so well and Europe is struggling, their blocking the vaccine is kinda understandable.
Australia asks EU to review blocking of AstraZeneca vaccine shipment
By Rachel Clun and Bevan Shields Updated March 5, 2021 — 1.55pm first published at 12.42pm
Australia has asked the European Commission to review a decision to block a shipment of 250,000 AstraZeneca vaccine doses but Health Minister Greg Hunt says the pace of the nation’s rollout will not be affected.
Instead, Australia will rely on one million AstraZeneca doses every week rolling off production lines in Australia from March 22, when phase 1b of the national COVID-19 vaccination program is set to begin.
Vaccinated NSW quarantine worker who tested positive to coronavirus was infectious during overnight shift
"IMPT. all countries - Get guards out of corridors at quarantine hotels and get fresh air and CCTV in – experts "Much of Western Australia goes into five-day lockdown after hotel guard tests positive to UK Covid variant""
NSW Chief Health Officer Dr Kerry Chant (L) and NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard address the media after NSW recorded its first local COVID-19 case in 56 days. Source: AAP
A Sydney hotel quarantine worker who tested positive for COVID-19 on Saturday night had received the first dose of the Pfizer vaccination but was yet to develop immunity, said NSW Chief Health Officer Dr Kerry Chant.
Updated Updated 1 hour ago By Caroline Riches
A Sydney hotel quarantine security worker who has tested positive to COVID-19 was infectious during his shift on Friday night, causing 130 workers to immediately self-isolate, NSW Health said on Sunday.
NSW announced its first locally acquired case of COVID-19 in 56 days on Sunday after a 47-year-old security worker tested positive on Saturday night during routine testing despite having no symptoms.
The man's four family members have so far tested negative to the virus.
The source of the new infection, which will be included in Monday's numbers, is under investigation and urgent genome sequencing and testing of close contacts are underway, NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard and NSW Chief Health Officer Dr Kerry Chant told the media on Sunday.
The person, who works at Sydney's Sofitel Sydney Wentworth and Mantra Sydney Central hotels at the weekend and at an office during the week, received his first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccination on March 2, with his next second dose due "in the next week or so," Mr Hazzard said.
Dr Chant said his immune response was not expected to kick in until at least 12 to 14 days after the jab, which means the man was considered infectious during his shift at the Sydney Wentworth hotel on Friday night.
Authorities have asked 130 people who worked at the hotel from 7pm on Friday night to 7am on Saturday to immediately self-isolate and get tested.
"We are asking those individuals to immediately self-isolate and get a test, and basically, that allows us time to work through and ascertain the nature of interaction that this security guard would have had to those quarantine workers," Dr Chant said.
Hotel quarantine staff working multiple jobs was identified as a risk factor in Melbourne's deadly second wave. Hotel quarantine workers are now banned from holding a second job in Victoria, but there is no such restriction in NSW.
NSW Health has also issued alerts on a few Sydney venues visited by the hotel worker
Why Are Conservatives More Susceptible to Believing Lies? An interplay between how all humans think and how conservatives tend to act might actually explain a lot about our current moment. [...] But illusions and delusions are based on conscious or unconscious wishes; Columbus’s belief that he had found a new route to the Indies was a delusion based on his wish that he had done so. P - Although Freud is out of favor with many contemporary psychologists, modern cognitive psychology suggests that he was on the right track. The tenacity of many of the right’s beliefs in the face of evidence, rational arguments, and common sense suggest that these beliefs are not merely alternate interpretations of facts but are instead illusions rooted in unconscious wishes. P -AKA, wishfulf'ing thinking. P - This is a very human thing to do. As popular writers such as Daniel Kahneman, Cass Sunstein, and Richard Thaler have pointed out, we often use shortcuts when we reason, shortcuts that enable us to make decisions quickly and with little expenditure of mental energy. P - But they also often lead us astray—we underestimate the risks of events that unfold slowly and whose consequences are felt only over the long term (think global warming) and overestimate the likelihood of events that unfold rapidly and have immediate consequences (think terrorist attacks). [...] Psychologists have repeatedly reported that self-described conservatives tend to place a higher value than those to their left on deference to tradition and authority. They are more likely to value stability, conformity, and order, and have more difficulty tolerating novelty and ambiguity and uncertainty. [...] As one Tea Party member told University of California sociologist Arlie Hochschild, “People think we are not good people if we don’t feel sorry for blacks and immigrants and Syrian refugees. But I am a good person and I don’t feel sorry for them.” P - Baptist minister and former Republican congressman J.C. Watts put it succinctly. Campaigning for Sen. Rand Paul in Iowa in 2015 he observed, “The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans believe people are fundamentally bad, while Democrats see people as fundamentally good.” P - These conservative traits lead directly to conservative views on many issues, just as liberal traits tend to lead to liberal views on many issues. But when you consider how these conservative traits and these conservative views interact with commonly shared patterns of motivated reasoning, it becomes clearer why conservatives may be more likely to run into errors in reasoning and into difficulty judging accurately what is true and what is false. P - It’s not just that Trump is “their” president, so they want to defend him. Conservatives’ greater acceptance of hierarchy and trust in authority may lead to greater faith that what the president says must be true, even when the “facts” would seem to indicate otherwise. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=159889863
Brisbane lockdown after four new coronavirus cases found
By Sarah Swain 9:47am Mar 29, 2021
Brisbane residents will be locked down from 5pm tonight after four new cases of locally transmitted coronavirus were identified.
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said she was "very worried" and had not slept as she confirmed the cases were the highly-infectious UK strain.
The lockdown of Greater Brisbane includes the areas of Brisbane, Logan, Moreton Bay, Ipswich and Redlands.
Health Minister Dr Jeanette Young described the spread as "significant".
There are now seven cases in total in the outbreak, which started three weeks ago after a doctor treating a COVID-19 patient was infected.
Annastacia Palaszczuk @AnnastaciaMP Four locally acquired cases recorded in Queensland overnight - two are linked and two are under investigation. The other six cases were overseas acquired and detected in hotel quarantine. 9:39 AM · Mar 29, 2021 69 52 Copy link to Tweet
Her sister also has the virus.
Both had been in Byron Bay while infectious.
Dr Young said she does not know how the other two new cases are linked. She suggested one could be a housemate of another patient.
More than 11,000 tests have been done in Queensland over the past 24 hours.
'This is the right thing'
Ms Palaszczuk earlier told Today the city would not enter a lockdown unless there were new untraced cases.
She has now told residents a lockdown is the best move to keep Queenslanders safe.
"I know this will mean some disruption to people's lives but we've done this before, and we've got through it over those three days in the past, and if everyone does the right thing, I'm sure that we will be able to get through it again," she said.
The premier has urged people not to panic buy. Residents will still be able to leave the home to shop under the lockdown rules.
The only other reasons to leave the house are for essential work, caring for a vulnerable person or exercise.
"They can go out and exercise in a family group or if they're by themselves with one other person from a different family group," Dr Young said.
A doctor from Princess Alexandra Hospital was infected while treating a coronavirus patient. (Tony Moore - Brisbane Times)
People can have two visitors to their home.
Schools will close from Tuesday but will remain open for children of essential workers.
Masks will be required for all Queenslanders.
Ms Palaszczuk said Scott Morrison had accepted her proposal to halve the rate of international arrivals to 1300 people a week.
"The halving of our international arrivals will also contribute to us being able to focus on the task at hand and hopefully after the three days we will be able to update Queenslanders," she said.
She has urged all other state and territory leaders to declare Greater Brisbane a hotspot.
Restrictions for all Queenslanders
Restrictions will not be limited to Greater Brisbane. All Queenslanders are being asked to wear face masks and indoor gatherings have been capped.
"We will be putting in that compulsory mask wearing for the rest of Queensland and limiting gatherings to your own home to 30 people," Ms Palaszczuk said.
"This is essential everyone that we do this to stop further transmission.
"We've seen what's happened in other countries. I don't want to see that happen to Queensland. I don't want to see that happen to Australia. I know in is a really big call.
"I know it is really tough. We have Easter coming up, we have school holidays coming up but let's do it now and let's do it right and let's see if we can."
dropdeadfred posted a rubbish anti-mitigation rant while i was off-line. Caught it on a couple of hours wandering on the first night back. It's somewhere .. ok .. here .. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=166987733 .. Harsh. Strident. Selfish as shit. Three of their traits.
Our governments have made mistakes, as all have, though nothing like Trump's disastrous early treatment of covid. And DeSantis and Abbott's continued fatal irresponsibility.
Here's one reason why Australia has been so successful in their approach to the virus.
Australia Is Betting on Remote Quarantine. Here’s What I Learned on the Inside.
The pandemic has reinforced countries’ peculiar currents of national identity. In Australia, it’s a collectivist urge, sometimes at the expense of personal liberty.
Cleaners at the Howard Springs quarantine center, the only one of its kind in Australia. Damien Cave/The New York Times
By Damien Cave Published Aug. 20, 2021Updated Sept. 23, 2021
I looked out the window as if my confusion could be cleared by the brown all around me — the single-story metal lodging, the pathways, the bags of food that had just been dropped off by workers in face shields. It was not yet 5 p.m. and they were delivering dinner?
Such is life in a former mining camp near the northern tip of the country, in a place called Howard Springs — a temporary home for hundreds of domestic and international travelers being forced to wait around long enough to prove they’re Covid-free.
Michael Nayda, a marine engineer from Sydney, being swabbed for Covid-19 on his second day in quarantine. Damien Cave/The New York Times
Quarantine has been a physical and temporal in-between ever since the first lazarettos were set up to fight the Black Death in medieval Europe. The practice, as Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley write in their fascinating new book “Until Proven Safe,” is both a medical tool and “an usually poetic metaphor for any number of moral, ethical and religious ills: It is a period of waiting to see if something hidden within you will be revealed.”
My experience exposed more than I expected, about human nature but also about the ways that the pandemic keeps pushing countries back into their own peculiar currents of national identity. In the United States, it’s individualism. In Australia, it’s the collectivist urge to protect the many by treating the few as a potential threat, sometimes at the expense of personal liberty.
Australia .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/world/australia/australia-home-quarantine-covid-new-zealand.html .. stands nearly alone in its bet on quarantine infrastructure as a long-term answer to the pandemic. Two more camps, each with a capacity of about 2,000 people, are being built outside Brisbane and Melbourne, and Sydney and Perth may not be far behind. The sites, called “centers for national resilience,” are an embodiment of the country’s commitment to Covid zero.
Officials maintain that these camps, which are mostly for travelers but can also be used to isolate the contagious, are necessary because hotel quarantine has repeatedly let Covid leak into the community. The current Delta surge that has led to lockdowns for half of the country began in June with an unvaccinated airport driver transporting people back and forth.
Workers delivering dinner. They work in only one block of the quarantine facility at a time to minimize the risk of spreading infection. Damien Cave/The New York Times
Howard Springs, which has yet to have a Covid outbreak traced to it since it opened last year, is the new model.
“If we quantify the risk of where we put people, I think Howard Springs is the lowest risk,” said Peter Collignon, a physician and public health expert at the Australian National University in Canberra. “Hotels are 99 percent effective, and for Australia, that’s the problem — they’re not 100 percent.”
That zero-tolerance attitude has kept Covid deaths far lower than in other countries, while dividing Australia. Most of the travelers I met in quarantine were from Sydney or Melbourne and were trying to get to Western Australia or Queensland, states that had shut their borders to anyone from a location with even a few dozen Covid cases. They would not let us enter and quarantine at our own cost, even when fully vaccinated.
So we had to go to the Northern Territory, the only place in Australia that would accept us. Howard Springs was what Malta had been to the British Empire — a place to let someone else deal with the problem.
And we were among the last ones in. A few days after we landed in Darwin, territory officials declared that we had exploited a “loophole” that would be closed. Howard Springs could no longer be used as an extended layover zone.
No beef or pork is served at the camp. Alcohol is prohibited. Damien Cave/The New York Times
“The policy is popular,” said Paul Italiano, an energy executive, who was moving to Perth, the capital of Western Australia, with his family after a few years in Sydney. “When we get back, we’re probably going to want to build a wall too.”
After all, he said, it had worked: Western Australia’s seven-day average for Covid cases during most of the pandemic has been, well, zero.
I wondered if an American like me could warm up to the approach.
Most of us in D block — where I was placed and could talk to a few people at a safe distance from our rooms’ verandas — arrived feeling irritated. Michael Nayda, a marine engineer who lives in Sydney but had a job out of the port in Darwin, said he was frustrated with the people violating lockdown rules and keeping caseloads rising. I was upset about the hassle and cost. The extra flights plus the fees for Howard Springs (2,500 Australian dollars, or $1,825, for 14 days, including food) seemed to make little economic or scientific sense.
But at some point, I noticed an attitudinal shift. Maybe we’d been softened by the desserts — the sharp lemon meringue, the lush chocolate tart. One day, when the food delivery carts rumbled in, I peered down our row and noticed that we were all craning our necks, leaning out from our little balconies, like animals at a zoo.
“It’s a bit Pavlovian, isn’t it?” Mr. Nayda said. “The sound of the trolleys, the paper bags.”
Health workers visiting a woman in quarantine to give her a daily temperature check. Damien Cave/The New York Times
He was right. But it was also a shared experience. Many of us fell into the same daily routine: up early, exercise outside, work or read, nap in the afternoon, return to the veranda for sunset. There was a simple natural rhythm around the most basic human needs — outdoor space and social interaction.
It was a step up, Mr. Nayda said, from the solitary confinement of hotel quarantine, which he’d endured earlier in the pandemic.
Ms. Twilley, co-author of “Until Proven Safe,” told me that Howard Springs resembled the old lazarettos.
“Historically, quarantine facilities all had to have incredible ventilation, and that inadvertently made quarantining a more pleasant experience,” she said.
The problem, however, is that even humane quarantine amounts to a forced retreat. The decisions made by governments about who poses a risk are rarely politics-free, and frequently go beyond medicine to fears shaped by emotions and biases.
Australia fused its earliest quarantine efforts in the 1800s and early 1900s to its racist “white Australia” policy. The first director-general of Australia’s Department of Health, John Cumpston, even directly stated that quarantine was meant to keep the continent free of both diseases and “certain races of aliens whose uncleanly customs and absolute lack of sanitary conscience form a standing menace to the health of any community.”
A Covid-19 testing clinic in Sydney earlier this month. The current Delta surge has shut down Sydney and Melbourne. Matthew Abbott for The New York Times
The “centers for national resilience” may echo that past — as part of Australia’s strict system of border control, often condemned for its use of indefinite offshore detention for asylum seekers.
“It sounds a bit unfair, but it’s going to be for people from countries like India, the Philippines — places where getting vaccines and public health will be more difficult to track,” Dr. Collignon said. “That’s who is going to be there.”
By the time I left on Friday, it wasn’t just my confusion over week and weekend that made me pause. Australia also seemed to have lost its sense of time and focus. It was letting the pandemic revive its most fundamental urge since British settlement: anxious isolation.
The state-versus-state squabbles felt colonial. The quarantine expansion hinted at a parochial fear of anyone not right next door. Last month, Australia slashed its slim allotment for international arrivals in half, to just 3,000 a week. There are nearly 40,000 Australians trying to get home.
Quarantine in Australia, I realized as I walked away from the camp, snapping a selfie for my daughter, is no longer simply a place. It has become a state of mind. Hopefully it won’t be permanent.
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