Dawson slams 300,000 West Australians who are in no rush to get vaccinated

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Western Australia’s vaccine commander says about 15 per cent of the state’s population, or 300,000 people, were putting their lives at risk by just ‘sitting back’ and avoiding the COVID-19 vaccination.

WA police commissioner Chris Dawson, who is in charge of the vaccine rollout, said he was confident the state would easily reach an 80 per cent vaccination rate but the final 20 per cent were proving trickier to convince.

WA Police Commissioner and vaccine commander Chris Dawson.Credit:Hamish Hastie

He said research undertaken by the government suggested there was about 5 per cent of people who had made up their minds and decided they would not get the jab and 15 per cent either hesitant or waiting until an outbreak.

“What I’m chiefly concerned about in our research is that about 15 per cent of the population are just presently hesitating or waiting until the disease arrives in the community and then say: ‘I’ll do it then’,” he said.

“That is a really bad choice to make.”

The vaccination rhetoric from government channels up to this point has been largely optimistic and encouraging, but Mr Dawson ramped up his language this morning with a more alarmist message.

“My message is very strongly to that 15 per cent to 20 per cent of the population who are sitting back, this is not a disease you can muck around with,” he said.

“You’ve seen numbers of reports in New South Wales where people have said, ‘hey, this is real, I’ve lost my loved one, or I’ve been badly impacted by this disease and I wish I’d been vaccinated’.”

Mr Dawson also urged those people in that 15 per cent to reject the misinformation around vaccinations.

“If you want to go through spurious internet messaging and take that as the premier medical advice, you’re making a very sobering choice,” he said.

“I’m really strongly saying to the community, you’ve got to trust the medical science, they’re there to protect us and that’s why I’ve changed my mission somewhat to target that 50 per cent that are just sitting back, and they’re apathetic.”

Mr Dawson’s comments echoed Health Minister Roger Cook’s who criticised nurses who attended the ‘freedom day’ rally in Perth on Saturday.

“I just quite simply do not understand how you can dedicate your life to medical science, but on this issue choose to step away from that science and adopt strange, weird sort of attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccine,” he said.

“I don’t understand how you can, on the one hand, inject your patients, day in day out with different medications that we know are safe but when it comes to COVID-19, decide that all those protocols which decide those drugs are safe are no longer relevant.”

Mr Cook also announced health authorities were reviewing WA’s border arrangements with Queensland and NSW.

NSW recorded 259 cases on Monday.

The state was declared an extreme risk jurisdiction in August after its average case numbers exceeded 500 per day.

According to WA’s border rules, all travel between extreme risk states is banned except for diplomats and politicians.

NSW’s dropping case numbers means its five-day average has dropped to 333 cases while its 14-day average has dropped to 455.

Queensland is also likely to drop from low risk to very low risk after it managed to stamp out community spread of the virus.

Mr Cook said he was expecting advice from Chief Health Officer Andy Robertson in the next couple of days about those states and would make announcements shortly after.

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