Vax

The ultimate gateway drug

Vax me, baby

A brief, pre-departure story:

To get permission to leave Australia, there was no specific requirement to be vaccinated, but there was no way we were leaving without a jab, or rather, two, and it was the first thing we took care of. (Though, not just because of travel.)

The vaccination rules vary from airline to airline, and as it happens, Air France/Cathay Pacific (with whom we are flying) doesn’t require you to be vaccinated. However, if you aren’t, you must present a negative Covid test result conducted within 72 hours of departure.

That is, you have a choice: show your Vax Certificate or show a negative test.

Regardless, to do almost anything in France––restaurants, theatres, movies, and other such venues––you need a pass sanitaire, and to qualify for that, you need proof of vaccination.

President Macron famously said he intended to shift the onus onto the unvaccinated, and you might’ve seen his comments:

I no longer have any intention of sacrificing my life, my time, my freedom and the adolescence of my daughters, as well as their right to study properly, for those who refuse to be vaccinated. This time you stay at home, not us.

I was vaccinated but I couldn’t prove it, and that was because I didn’t have a Medicare Card. For reasons too long to go into, mine had been cancelled, and I was having a mad time trying to replace it, not least because lockdown meant I couldn’t visit a Medicare office. I had to make do with emails and phone calls and that turned out to be like paddling a yacht with a Paddle Pop stick.

(By the way, I have heard people say you can’t get vaccinated without a Medicare Card, but I am living proof that is not true. I was able to show other ID, and although it caused a bit of concern at the counter, the vax people ended up shrugging and letting me go through. Which is as it should be as not everyone––including the homeless––has a Medicare card.)

Anyway, two days before departure I still didn’t have my new Medicare card. Which meant I also didn’t have proof of vaccination. Which was likely to be a huge problem in France.

In desperation, I rang Medicare one more time, and not only was I put straight through to a human rather than another set of menus and piped music, but, praise the Lord, I was put through to one of those humans whose working assumption is not that they must stop you achieving your goal––a new Medicare Card––but one who presumed that his job was to help me get the friggin’ card.

It was all sorted within twenty minutes, including the vax certificate.

What’s more, he did it without reference to any of the other reams of correspondence I had provided them since April: he simply asked me fairly standard questions to establish my identity. In other words, any of the other half-dozen people I had spoken to over the last six months could’ve done the same thing.

So now we wait and see what happens with the pass sanitaire. All the paperwork is lodged, and they promise a turnaround of eleven days, max. Doigts croisés.

Worth noting, too, that Australia is still considered a “green list” country which means when we arrive, we don’t have to quarantine or isolate. All we have to do is provide a declaration that we have not had any of the usual symptoms within the last 24 hours.

All this is a reminder of the extent to which our lives are already wrapped up in red tape of one sort or another, and that something like Covid only encourages governments to add yet more layers.

This isn’t simply a whinge, or a cry for moar freedumb, a la the anti-vaxers and anti-maskers. It is a reminder that so much of what we are forced to go through is arbitrary and could be eliminated by ensuring staff are properly trained (and remunerated) and governments and providers were obliged to keep front-of-mind that their job is service not process, that, like my Medicare guy, they understand their role is to solve our problems, not put more barriers in our way.

Seems to me there is a huge untapped resource available out there for leftist politics to address these everyday concerns, to promise to make people’s lives easier by ensuring every interaction with government isn’t reduced to this sort of mind-numbing bureaucracy.

Sounds like a naive dream until you think about my Medicare guy: he did it, just by doing it.