Our well-meaning efforts to use images to help demystify the vaccination process or share our pride in getting a COVID vaccine can backfire.
The mechanisms behind vaccine-related and pill-related clots are quite different.
COVID-19 variants of concern have changed the game. We need to recognise and act on this to avoid future waves of infections, yet more lockdowns and restrictions, and avoidable illness and death.
We need to stop relying on small GP clinics and urgently move towards using mass vaccination hubs like stadiums, schools and parks.
All vaccines and medications come with risks. But the risks of delaying vaccination are far higher.
We need to re-analyse data from China and look further afield if we are to have a more complete picture of what happened in 2019. Just keep the politics out of it.
The revamped Victorian hotel quarantine system appears to have addressed the weaknesses of the previous system, particularly around the risk of airborne transmission.
These mistakes have been mainly caused by our leaders giving priority to a good political story over good policy.
Several factors converge in this region to produce significant risk. The tentacles of this particular outbreak might be more far-reaching, so it's crucial we get testing numbers up.
People who have had COVID will still benefit from having a COVID vaccine. Here's why.
If we want to prevent lockdowns in the future, we need to know what happened at the Brisbane hospital at the centre of these recent clusters. And we just don't have the facts yet.
From today, around 1,000 clinics around the country can begin vaccinating eligible Australians.
At first glance, Australia looks to be tracking poorly compared to the rest of the world. However, context is really important here.
It's all well and good to be able to connect cases through genomic sequencing. But it's important to be able to connect them epidemiologically as well.
The government should be explicit about what proportion of the population will need to be vaccinated to warrant border reopening. Australians could then measure progress towards that goal.
Decades of experience with influenza offers insights into how we should handle new SARS-CoV-2 variants, and the threat they pose to vaccine effectiveness.
For people who are immunodeficient, the usual controls of the immune system don't work as well. This can affect how they respond to vaccines. But this group should still get the COVID jab.
Pausing COVID-19 vaccine rollouts can backfire. There are better ways to manage safety issues while they're being investigated.
It's not too late for Australia to repair our vaccine strategy, though we will never make up for the months lost.
Data from clinical trials and the real world COVID vaccine rollout suggest blood clots occur no more frequently in vaccinated people than they do in the general population.
