STEVE PRICE, PRESENTER: Pat Conroy is the Labor MP for Shortland, he’s not very happy about the way – and we had a lot of calls about this last week – about how Pfizer vaccinations have been ripped out of regional NSW to be injected into the arms of HSC students in Sydney today, particularly those from those eight LGA’s. He’s on the line, good to talk to you Pat.
PAT CONROY, MEMBER FOR SHORTLAND: G’day Steve, how are you?
PRICE: Good. No sooner had you lost the vaccines, you had an outbreak and a lockdown.
CONROY: Absolutely, and in fact it should be noted that that vaccine hub where the vaccines were stolen from was vaccinating people on the Central Coast where there were active cases. So the NSW Government was actually taking, or stealing vaccines from areas that already had COVID in the community.
PRICE: Makes no sense. It didn’t make any sense at the time, and last week I took call after call after call from people in regional NSW who had a text message cancelling their vaccination appointment. No one even bothered to ring them, it was just a text message. Many of them had been waiting weeks and weeks to get a vaccine jab, and many of them worked in frontline work. I mean one bloke was working making deliveries to aged care.
CONROY: It was an act of absolute insanity and it’s one that just made no sense from day one and it left my community as sitting ducks. And I had phone calls from people who were aged care workers who were supposed to be vaccinated by Easter who had finally got an appointment for a Pfizer jab, and she had her appointment cancelled because of this very, very silly act by the State Government.
PRICE: And then magically, there’s a secret stash of Pfizer vaccine that the Prime Minister finds and sends to New South Wales anyway.
CONROY: Which we’ve no idea where it came from and when it’s going to get there. So I asked the first question to the Prime Minister in Question Time on Thursday and he said the vaccine rollout is going from strength to strength which is utter rubbish, because for example in my community in Shortland, there’s not a single GP who has a Pfizer appointment available, not a single one. So I don’t know how he can claim that they’re maintaining their supply of Pfizer because people in my community can’t get the vaccination that everyone is telling them to get.
And it’s actually really insulting. This is probably one of the most common complaints I get is people saying ‘we’re getting yelled at to get the vaccinations, and we want to get the vaccine, but we can’t get an appointment’.
PRICE: So what’s the situation with the restrictions in the area of Shortland? You take in all those beautiful beaches of course near Newcastle, are you caught up in the Hunter restrictions?
CONROY: Yes, so we’re completely in lockdown being in between Newcastle and the Central Coast, so we’ve got the lockdown that applies to all of Sydney other than the Western Sydney LGAs that have the stricter lockdown. So you’re only allowed out for your essential groceries or if you’re an essential worker or for exercise, and we’ve got 17 cases in the community of COVID.
And what’s really scary and the thing that I’m as furious about as the vaccines being stolen is that the system is broken. For example, people are waiting four days to get a test result, and that’s if they can get a test. So for example, slightly further to the north of me where there was hotspots declared, there wasn’t a single testing facility open on a Sunday. So how can people get tested? And then they have to wait up to four days to get a result, and now we are seeing contact spots being announced or 12 days ago. Well if it’s taking that long to identify them, I think we’ve got buckley's of keeping this under control anytime soon.
PRICE: Given, you know, we are now more than a year into this pandemic, I can’t understand how the various health authorities in various states are still so underprepared.
CONROY: It’s almost criminal, and I think, I know other people are talking about a Royal Commission into the COVID response when we get through it, and we just need to get through it first and then work out what went wrong, but there seems to be chronic under-preparation everywhere of just juggling things and just decisions being made on the run. But decisions around the vaccines by the Federal Government last year was just so shortsighted and stupid, and then obviously the health authorities, some of them making decisions about who gets testing facilities, who gets access to the vaccines, who does the rollout, and it just defies common sense. And ultimately it’s your listeners, it’s the people of Australia that are paying the price for this very silly approach.
PRICE: Yeah just take the case of the Hunter hospital. It’s an exposure site, Dr McAnulty told us that on Saturday, and said anyone there between 8.40pm on August 5 and 1.50am on August 6 is a close contact, you’ve got to get tested and isolate for 14 days regardless of symptoms, well that’s a bit hard when you can’t get a test!
CONROY: Oh absolutely, and I had a constituent ring me on Thursday night. She’d been a close contact at our biggest shopping centre at Charlestown Square. She had symptoms, she had a sore throat and a runny nose. She got turned away at one of the testing facilities because the police had closed it because the queue was so long and it was interrupting traffic. She went to a second one, waited there and got turned away from there. So she tried for seven hours.
I’ve heard of other cases – for example, there’s an exposure site that’s a special school in the Hunter Valley, and you’ve got distraught parents with kids with high needs trying to get tests, can’t get tests, knowing that they are waiting in cars for six or seven hours, and then at the end of it they are probably going to have to hold down their child so that they can get tested. This is just, it really makes me furious because it’s the people who are suffering because of the incompetence of the authorities.
PRICE: Good to catch up with you, thank you very much Pat.
CONROY: Thanks Steve, have a good day.