Sorry but Alan cheng is recognised as one of the better experts in Australia. What he says makes sense to me. I did post a trial from the UK that gave 3 doses of AZ. The highest antibody response was when the third dose was given > 6 months after the second.
I really worry when quite a few on here criticise ATAGI because they won't do what the poster wants. They operate according to the science which unfortunately isn't what some of us recent experts don't fully understand.
I wasn’t really having a go at Alan although re-reading I can see how it looks that way now / yes he is well respected but as many of us know there is a problem, either with the type of clinicians that are on the board at ATAGI or there is a problem with the actual remit of ATAGI…
I’m not a clinician, so I listen to the
ID clinicians we know who are also versed in public health and they have have been very critical of the AZ bungles and now the slowness on reacting to the booster intervals.
They are critical that ATAGI seems to be taking a purist clinician/scientist view (1-1 v population) of matters not allowing for public health views, is not fast enough to keep up with the context in which these decisions should be applied (eg their disastrous assumption that near covid zero would be maintained during the strollout- seriously flawed assumption!) and now they seem to be doing it yet again with the boosters.
Some defenders of the people on the ATAGI board actually say that it’s the remit / covenant of ATAGI that is the issue, that it actually doesn’t ALLOW the board to take into account many environmental factors and risks. Again - if this is the case the actual remit of ATAGI is seriously flawed because in a pandemic this is constantly changing and needs to be dynamically factored in. Many are suggesting their role needs to be changed or given support to assist. That or ATAGI isn’t used solely for these decisions.
Finally one big issue is that all this creates massive issues with our state based CHO’s some of who openly defied / were about to ignore ATAGI’s decisions. This really dented trust in them.
It also sets ATAGI up perfectly to be cannon fodder for the politicians, because they are being asked to make decisions they actually cannot make so the politicians have an easy get out blaming “the ‘slow, out of touch but expert panel’ which we unfortunately have to listen to but that’s why the vaccine rollout was so slow sorry, we’ve called the emergency Nat Cab today and we are pressuring our ‘slow, out of touch but expert panel’ to again drop the booster interval”.
ATAGI is absolutely needed but something isn’t quite working and it’s very clear.
But I agree with you - it won’t be decided on this forum that’s for sure
www.smh.com.au
