Anti-vaxxers letter-drop households as Australia prepares for COVID-19 vaccine rollout
Concerns have been raised over anti-vaxxer leaflets being left in letterboxes in the Macedon Ranges and Hume City council areas, north of Melbourne.
Federal Member for McEwen Rob Mitchell said he has had several complaints about the leaflets that include conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 vaccine and 5G mobile phone towers.
“I think the people leaving these pamphlets need to grow up and stop importing US conspiracy theories and trying to run it here in Australia,” he said.
The Hume local council area takes in Sunbury where multiple locations were deemed exposure sites by the Victorian Health Department on Wednesday after another hotel worker tested positive for coronavirus.
It’s the third so far linked to the Holiday Inn quarantine hotel at Melbourne Airport after a returned traveller and an authorised officer also tested positive to coronavirus.
Mr Mitchell urged anyone who received one to throw it in the bin immediately.
“And to ensure the advice people are getting is from health professionals and not some US organisation that people are trying to emulate here in Australia.”
Vaccine conspiracy theories
It follows a year where groups peddling conspiracies theories and anti-vaccination ideas have tried to overrun government health messages.
In April last year, a Nazi flag and two Chinese flags were attached to a Kyabram mobile phone tower. The Nazi flag had the hashtag #COVID19 scrawled across it.
Other anti-vaxxer pamphlets were distributed around the Coburg area in August last year.
The pamphlets dropped into letterboxes around the Macedon Ranges and Hume areas claim the COVID-19 vaccinations are more deadly than the virus and that vaccinating the population is about control, not COVID-19.
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is the first to receive Commonwealth regulatory approval and will arrive in Australia over the coming weeks.
Two doses are provided three weeks apart and the vaccine must be stored and transported at minus 70 degrees Celsius.
The Oxford-AstraZeneca variant, which does not need cold storage, is yet to receive Commonwealth regulatory approval.
The Federal Government has already bought 53.8 million doses of the vaccine.
South Africa will halt the rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine after trial data showed the jab offered limited protection against mild disease in the variant that emerged in the country.
Early data from an Oxford University study suggested the AstraZeneca vaccine offered only “minimal protection” against mild disease caused by the South Africa COVID-19 variant.
But Australian experts and health authorities say the data set is too small to draw any major conclusions.
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