Protect our kids from COVID-19: Lockdown to zero
Without a vaccine for children under 12 we need EVERY public health measure to save our kids.
 
Australia is at a turning point in the pandemic. The alarming case numbers in NSW are threatening the whole country. The illness, suffering and death caused by this outbreak was completely preventable. The Berejiklian government’s reckless mismanagement of the COVID outbreak has led to this situation. Instead of doubling down using every available public health measure from a lockdown across Sydney, improved OH&S measures for genuinely essential workers and paying everyone else to stay home Berejiklian has allowed case numbers to skyrocket.
 
With cases doubling every 9 days in NSW (as at August 27 2021), the Berejiklian government has announced that schools will open at the end of October when no one knows what the case count will be!
 
Now Berejiklian is arguing our way out of this public health disaster hinges on vaccines alone. The Prime Minister, Scott Morrison is also promoting this strategy. Both contend that after we hit a 70% or 80% vaccination target of the 16+ population Australia will be able to “open-up” and ease public health restrictions.
 
This is a disastrous strategy. The currently available vaccines do not prevent transmission and breakthrough infections in the fully vaccinated are common. This means the vaccinated proportion of the population will be able to transmit COVID to the unvaccinated.
 
Vaccines have only just become available for children 12 years and above and its’s unclear how quickly they will be vaccinated when supply is still limited.
 
Most alarmingly, the Australian vaccine targets promoted by the federal and NSW government ignore the almost 20% of the population under 15.
 
There is NO approved vaccine for children under 12 anywhere in the world. In fact, the vaccine trials for Pfizer and Moderna for use in children are still running at the time of publishing. This means that until these trials are over, no vaccine will be approved by any regulatory body. Horrifyingly, the Doherty modeling projects 57 child COVID deaths at an 80% of the 16+ population vaccination rate and reduced public health measures.
 
Without a vaccine all our children remain extremely vulnerable but particularly children from indigenous and disadvantaged backgrounds. Andrew Miller, former AMA WA President describes the very real risk to children in an outbreak where they are still unvaccinated:
 
Hospitalisation of children for Delta is not unusual at all, running at about one per cent of confirmed paediatric cases in the US. The other real worry is that about 40 per cent of kids still have symptoms at four months, and 7 per cent have disabling physical or mental issues at six months, which can lead into long COVID syndrome.
 
At the time of writing 45% of infections in the Victorian outbreak and NSW 30% of cases are children and teenagers under 19. Tragically, already one 15 year old, Osama Subuh has died with COVID after contracting the virus at the KFC where he worked.
 
All around the world there are living case studies highlighting why the Australian and NSW’s government’s attempts to make us “live with Delta” just mean more death and suffering.
 
For example, Israel is experiencing a significant 4th wave of the pandemic. The country has 78% of the total 12 years and older population vaccinated and eased almost all public health restrictions. Israel is now experiencing almost 8000 new daily cases and a hundred deaths a week despite their high levels of vaccination. Infections are occurring in both the vaccinated and un-vaccinated population and even vaccinated people are being hospitalised. While vaccination has reduced mortality in Israel we should not accept any deaths that could have been prevented by proper public health measures.
 
This terrible future can be averted if our government implemented the necessary measures to return to COVID zero which would protect our children and stop them being the victim of a horrible public health experiment.

Covid zero is the only way to ensure the safety of our kids and ensure their lives are not devastated by preventable disease.  
 
That’s why we demand the following:
 
- A return to the policy of getting community transmission back to zero, as the only way to adequately protect the health of the population.
- A proper lockdown to achieve this goal, especially the closure of non-essential workplaces, which has repeatedly been shown to work in Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia.  No lifting of lockdown measures until community transmission is back to zero.
- An increase in the amount and accessibility of support payments, regardless of visa status. Pay people to stay at home!
- No return to schools until it is safe. Free laptops and Wi-Fi access for all public-school students to learn from home.
- Thorough measures to make essential work safer, including mass testing, the transformation of workplace environments to ensure better ventilation, restricted rostering, better PPE, etc.
- Vaccination programs that include children, and target essential workers, including paid vaccine leave, workplace vaccination drives, and proper vaccine education campaigns.
- Purpose-built, Delta-proof, quarantine facilities, which can prevent the constant outbreaks caused by leakages, while allowing for as many returning citizens, refugees, and migrants as is safely possible.
- A massive increase in health funding, hospital and ICU capacity and staffing levels.
 

This petition was prepared by activists from Zero Covid Schools (@zerocovid_edu) and Lockdown to Zero (@lockdowntozero). You can join our next campaign event here: https://fb.me/e/1F1uUDzp2