The past month has seen growing concern about how Australia’s coronavirus vaccination programme is currently failing people with disability. So serious is this failure that the Royal Commission on Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability was driven to hold a special hearing on 17 May to consider “the approach of the Australian Government and its agencies to the vaccination of people with disability and disability support workers”.
Although a full report is not yet available, the evidence given to the Commission and other information that has emerged elsewhere over the past weeks, confirms that something has gone seriously awry with the planned prioritisation of the ‘most vulnerable’ in the COVID vaccine rollout.
People with disability are among those most at risk of serious illness if they contract COVID, for a variety of reasons: sometimes they have additional health problems such as respiratory disease or diabetes, but it can also be because of social marginalisation associated with disablement. Many severely disabled people are particularly at risk because of the ease with which COVID spreads among support workers, or in residential care settings. For these reasons people with relevant disabilities, as well as workers in aged and disability care facilities, were included in phase 1a and 1b of the Australian vaccine rollout plan.
Yet figures reported at the Royal Commission hearing showed that fewer than 1,000 people with disability in residential care facilities and 1,527 support workers had been vaccinated nationally. Disabled people and their families have been reporting that it is next to impossible to get any information, let alone the vaccine itself. All of this suggests that once again, people with disability are being treated as less important and more expendable than others. It is important to be clear that this goes beyond being a regrettable logistical hiccup: it is a profound moral failure as well.
In this piece written for The Conversation on 25 April, Anne Kavanagh from the Melbourne Disability Institute and Helen Dickinson from UNSW Canberra consider some of the issues raised. And this feature from The Guardian Australia reports on the Royal Commission hearing.
