Category: Life & Culture

Work is progressing on the introduction of vaccine passports for international travel and domestic use – as states and territories get closer to achieving the vaccine thresholds set for reopening Australia.

Vaccine passports are set to become a crucial tool for identifying vaccination status as Australia progresses towards a reality of living with COVID-19.

Work is progressing to introduce the COVID-19 vaccination certificates to provide proof of vaccination for international travel as well as for domestic use.

The federal government says international vaccine passports will be available for fully-vaccinated Australians in coming weeks as it prepares for the return of overseas travel.

But it is unclear when the passports will be put into use for overseas travel with international borders still closed.

It is also not clear when the certificates would be rolled out for domestic use to unlock potential privileges such as allowing people to attend venues or events.

Here is what we know so far about how vaccine certificates could work.

Vaccine passports for international travel

The vaccine passport is expected to be available for international travel either on the traveller’s phone or in a printed form.

Tourism Minister Dan Tehan on Wednesday said the final details of the vaccine passport were being worked through.

“We are in the process of planning that – so that in the coming weeks we will have a system up and ready,” he told reporters.

He indicated this would help facilitate both the return of outbound and inbound international travel for Australians when vaccination thresholds reach 80 per cent.

“Australians will be able to travel overseas again and Australians will be able to return home in greater numbers,” he said.

The certificate would consist of personal information – like what is on a passport – with a QR code.

it is understood that Australians coming back into the country won’t need to display the certificate because it will be embedded in an individual’s passport.

An Australian going overseas wanting to use documentary evidence would get access to an international app and use a digital seal or a QR code that can be scanned overseas.

The certificates would be able to prove vaccine status internationally; and recognise vaccines approved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration, such as the AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

‘It’s not just about crossing borders’

Biometric and identity expert Dr Ted Dunstone said implementing the vaccine passport for international travel presented a complex challenge, with difficulties remaining around providing proof of vaccination overseas.

“There’s a very big jigsaw puzzle of technology, policy and other considerations that need to fit together,” he told SBS News.

“It’s not just about crossing borders. Crossing borders is part of the story but when I’m in a country, if I want to go to a cafe or do anything, I’m going to need to be able to present whatever credentials.”

In France, people now need a health pass – or proof of vaccination – to gain access to restaurants, bars, museums and sports venues.

In the United States, different rules also already apply for vaccinated and unvaccinated international arrivals entering the country.

People who have had vaccines approved by the World Health Organisation are able to self-monitor for COVID-19 symptoms and get tested three to five days after arriving.

However, those who are unvaccinated must self-quarantine for seven days following their arrival.

Dr Dunstone also said concerns remain about the potential for these systems to become targets of fraud or a black market for certificates.

“None of these systems are foolproof and they all come with trade-offs,” he said.

Vaccine certificates for domestic use

The federal government is also exploring how vaccine certificates could provide proof of vaccination via check-in apps, like the ones currently used to scan QR codes for entry into venues.

This would allow the vaccine certificate to display information to show an individual’s vaccination status – fully vaccinated, not fully vaccinated or exempt from vaccination.

Mr Tehan said the domestic system was aimed at making it easier for Australians to display proof of vaccination across Australia.

“We will be looking at developing a QR code which works with state and territory apps so where you are required to prove you’ve got a vaccination certificate, you’ll be able to do so in a very simple way,” he said.

“It will also mean when you’re going to other events – whether it be concerts or the theatre – that you’ll be able to demonstrate quite clearly your vaccination certification.”

When will the vaccination passports become necessary?

The government has indicated overseas travel will resume once states hit the 80 per cent vaccination threshold for those aged 16-plus; and when a robust home quarantine system is established.

Domestically, the reopening plan based on 70 per cent to 80 per cent vaccine thresholds also marks the time when lockdowns are set to be phased out.

Currently, around 39 per cent of the population in Australia aged over 16 is fully vaccinated.

Tourism and Transport Forum chief executive Margy Osmond said the industry welcomed progress towards proof of vaccination certificates.

“We think it’s very much a go-er, but the issue will be also giving businesses sufficient time to prepare for the demand when we do open and people go: ‘I’ve got my vaccination pass and I’m off’,” she told SBS News.

Labor’s health spokesperson, Mark Butler, said businesses were desperate for certainty around the plan.

“Business is ready to go. There is demand for international passports from our airlines, from other countries, but we don’t have a plan from Scott Morrison to actually make it work,” he told reporters. SBS

Mehmet Ali Çelebi, a 70-year-old inmate with advanced leukemia, has died almost two weeks after being released from prison following strong reactions from hundreds of social media users.

The purge victim man was incarcerated over alleged membership to the Gulen group, accused of masterminding a coup attempt in 2016. The group denies any involvement.

In addition to leukemia, he also suffered from kidney failure and thus receives daily dialysis treatment.

He was released from Ankara’s Sincan prison late on August 27. TurkeyPurge

Scott Morrison has conceded opening Australia’s internal borders will be up to state governments despite making Christmas a key goal.

The prime minister has been pushing premiers and chief ministers to allow families to be reunited at the end of the year as part of a national agreement.

There remains ongoing tensions with state and territory governments over the plan to reduce restrictions when 70 and 80 per cent of the over-16 population is vaccinated.

WA Premier Mark McGowan has signalled he won’t abandon his hardline stance towards states with high virus cases.

Attorney-General Michaelia Cash warned the same legal arguments that led the High Court to block billionaire Clive Palmer’s WA border challenge last year could change at the higher vaccine coverage threshold.

“Once you hit 80 per cent, you are in a fundamentally different position if you are looking at the issue of proportionality,” the most senior WA federal government member told The Australian.

Senator Cash said the government was not considering court action but expects Mr Palmer or others could try to overturn interstate travel bans.

Senior Labor frontbencher Tanya Plibersek said the Morrison government had supported the billionaire’s last legal effort.

“Court challenges are ridiculous,” she told the ABC.

“When Clive Palmer wanted to take the West Australian government to court, I think he united every West Australian against him.”

The federal government argues it withdrew from the case despite earlier intervening in support of Mr Palmer.

Liberal frontbencher Jane Hume said Senator Cash’s comments were misinterpreted as paving the way for a court challenge.

“There is going to be no High Court challenge,” she told the ABC.

“She was saying the reasoning behind that High Court challenge last year, that was taken out by Clive Palmer, the reasoning behind that really will have been diminished once we reach those vaccination rates.”

Mr Morrison said he expected leaders to ensure the country reconnected safely when high vaccination rates were reached.

“Ultimately, everything is a state matter,” he told reporters in Canberra.

“But, I know that there was agreement to the national plan, which wants to see Australians come together, and we want to do that safely.”

An alliance of 80 major employers including the big four banks, Qantas, mining giant BHP, major supermarkets and energy companies have called for the national plan to be maintained.

Australia has fully vaccinated 35 per cent of its population aged 16 and over, while 58.7 have received one dose. aap

There have been 21 new cases of Covid-19 detected in New Zealand, bringing the total number of people infected in the latest outbreak to 51. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern indicated she not think the latest outbreak had hit its peak. Because Auckland is at the centre of the outbreak, she said it was “very likely” restrictions would remain beyond Tuesday.

17 people charged over lockdown breaches

Seventeen people have been charged with breaking with Covid-19 lockdown restrictions this lockdown, Ms Ardern said. A further 70 people have been issued infringements. Ms Ardern applauded the numbers as very low in the circumstances.

PM defends speed of releasing locations of interest

Locations of interest prior to August 7 have been taken of the list, Ms Ardern said. This needs to be updated on the Ministry of Health (MOH) site though, she added.

“There is always a balance to be struck,” between getting locations of interest up quickly on the MOH site, and putting up wrong locations of interest that lead to an influx of people getting tested unnecessarily, Ms Ardern said.

Director of Public Health Dr Caroline McElnay said people who were close contacts would have already been contacted by health officials before the new locations went up on the locations of interest site.  news.com.au

Australia’s oldest man has revealed some of his secrets for long life – including eating chicken brains.

Dexter Kruger, a former rancher and vet, is 111 years and 124 days old and told the Australian Broadcasting Corp (ABC) a weekly poultry delicacy had contributed to his longevity.

Speaking from his nursing home in rural Queensland, Mr Kruger said: “Chicken brains. You know, chickens have a head. And in there, there’s a brain. And they are delicious little things. There’s only one little bite.”

Chicken’s brains are smaller even than the bird’s eyeball, according to cuisinevault.com, which describes them as “a fatty organ that taste a lot like chicken fat with a unique sponge-like texture”.

Mr Kruger’s son Greg, himself a sprightly 74, puts his father’s long life down to his simple Outback lifestyle.

Much of his longevity he puts down to the simple lifestyle he enjoyed in the bush.

National Cabinet on Monday discussed resetting the vaccine rollout on the back of updated medical advice recommending Australians under the age of 50 receive the Pfizer vaccine over AstraZeneca amid concerns about rare blood clots.

Doctors are now reporting patients are missing their appointments for the AstraZeneca vaccine over safety concerns, with thousands of doses sitting idle in fridges across the country.

The nation’s leaders agreed “in principle” to a series of changes to the vaccine strategy, including bringing forward the rollout to allow Australians over the age of 50 to receive the AstraZeneca vaccine.

The changes will be formally put forward for approval at the next meeting on Thursday.

Speaking ahead of National Cabinet, Mr Morrison said he did not want AstraZeneca doses to go to waste and would discuss offering Australians aged 50-69 the AstraZeneca vaccine when he met state and territory leaders today.

“We don’t want to see one vaccine that’s rolling off the line and going through the approval processes and the batch testing sitting in a fridge,” he said.

“If there’s someone over 50 who’s there and wants to take that vaccine we’ll be looking at how that can be achieved today.

“There are strong, strong arguments for the bring forward of over 50s with the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is a safe and effective vaccine for those aged over 50 and particularly important for those aged over 70 who are already in that priority group.”

Australians aged between 50-69 are currently in the so-called Phase 2a of the rollout, which has not begun yet.

The age group includes almost 6 million Australians, but so far just 1.5 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been distributed across the country.

According to the Department of Health, as at April 14, approximately 2.3 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine had been produced locally and 714,000 received from overseas.

Breakdowns of how many people have been given which vaccine are not provided by the government or health authorities.

The nation’s leaders also discussed setting up mass vaccination hubs, as vaccine supplies increased.

Mr Morrison also said he hoped to get millions of Australians under 50 in the last three months of the year, with the help of mass vaccination hubs.

“There’s a lot of work to be done given that would be effectively, if we wished, a 12-week sprint,” he said.

“There’d need to be plenty of planning to achieve that.”

The nation’s leaders today agreed the use of the centres should supplement the work of GPs in the rollout.

However, Mr Morrison said the mass vaccination clinics would hinge on vaccine stock, as the government is unlikely to receive millions of doses of the Pfizer and yet-to-be-approved Novavax vaccines until after October.

National Cabinet agreed that vaccinating the most vulnerable remains the top priority.

It was a sentiment shared by Shadow Health Minister Mark Butler ahead of the meeting.

“Scott Morrison promised aged care residents and disability facility residents, the most vulnerable members of our community, would be fully vaccinated by Easter, but still more than three-quarters of aged-care facilities have not had their residents fully vaccinated,” he said.

“This is simply not good enough; Australia needs to speed up this crucial vaccine rollout.

“I’d like to see a new plan with clear timelines and targets.

“The last one which had targets like 4 million Australians by end of March, the job done by October, is clearly in tatters, we need a new plan with revised timelines and targets.”

Mr Butler also said the capacity to manufacture mRNA vaccines on a large scale in Australia was urgently needed.

While protein-based vaccines like AstraZeneca have been widely used for viruses including the flu, mRNA vaccines like Pfizer have not been broadly distributed in Australia before and only a few countries can make them.

These vaccines effectively carry molecular instructions to make the SARS CoV-2 spike protein— so a person’s body can produce it and mount an immune response.

Health Minister Greg Hunt on Sunday said the government was talking widely with manufacturers to start producing the vaccine on a wide scale in Australia but said it could take the best part of a year to get off the ground.

But Mr Butler said the technology was a crucial part of a fight against COVID-19, which was needed “urgently”.

“Other countries, Germany for example, decided they wanted to manufacture their own mRNA vaccines in country, to be assured of supplies of these state of the art vaccines, and they built a factory in about six months,” he said.

“We’ve seen for months now, talk from the government and no action.”

Almost a third of the food produced worldwide goes to waste. That’s equivalent to around 1.3 billion tonnes. This waste is a global issue that has a negative impact on waste management systems, food insecurity, biodiversity and pollution. If food waste were a country, it would be the third biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world.

In the EU alone, 88 million tonnes of food waste is generated each year. Costs associated with this are estimated to be around 143 billion euros.

The European Commission is committed to meeting its Sustainable Development Goals and halving food waste per capita, at the retail and consumer level, by 2030. At the heart of the European Green Deal is the Farm to Fork Strategy. This strategy is looking to make food systems fairer, healthier and more environmentally friendly. That’s why the commission is proposing legally binding targets to reduce food waste across the EU by the end of 2023. It is also looking to revise EU rules on date-marking food by the end of 2022.Food waste affects many different areas, so there also are many ways to fight it.

Sirplus supermarkets in Berlin have found one effective way to reduce food waste and turn a profit at the same time. The company sells food that can be visually unappealing, mislabeled, or close to the best-before date.All their products are inspected to ensure that they are safe to eat before being sold in their shops or online. It also sells this food to charities, such as refugee centres and soup kitchens that need cheap food. Food sold at Sirplus can be up to 70% cheaper than conventional supermarkets.

Susanne Zander, the outreach manager at Sirplus, tells us that in 2020 they were able “to save 3.5 million products”. She says that ensuring that this food is not thrown away, means that they’re doing their “bit for sustainability and fighting greenhouse gas emissions”.

Creative cooking with surplus food

Hanna and Theresa work for Restlos Glücklich, a German non-profit organisation campaigning for more sustainable food consumption. They regularly rescue surplus food, which is close to expiring, or visually unattractive for educational projects.At their headquarters in Berlin, they teach people how to cook good and healthy meals using the food they recover. Showing how to make these under-appreciated ingredients into tasty dishes is also a way of reducing food waste. Hanna tells us that “across Germany 18 million tonnes of food are thrown away every year”. To her “that is totally absurd”. That’s why her association campaigns for food destined to be thrown away “to be reused, for it to be returned to the food cycle and for people to understand what it’s all about, what effects it has on the climate”.

Hanna’s online cooking classes for the association’s followers are also part of the #planetaryhealthchallenge, an international initiative looking to raise awareness about the best diet for people and planet.

Foodsharing initiatives

Getting people involved in saving food is at the heart of the foodsharing.de initiative, an online platform active in Germany and Austria. It coordinates the pick-up of excess food that is still edible, but would otherwise be thrown away, from people, retailers and producers. It is then taken free of charge by volunteers to public distribution centres. Katja Scheel is the communication manager for this platform. She says that “it’s a completely open movement, anyone can join in, anyone can get involved”. To this platform, it’s important that it’s a “participatory movement”. They currently have over 10,000 active members in Berlin.

One such member is Lena. She joined this ‘foodsharing’ initiative to do something about all the food that is being thrown away and to teach her son about sustainable food handling.

There are ways and means to decrease food waste which, in turn, will lower CO2 emissions and protect the planet. Making food that would otherwise be thrown out into a tasty dish is one of the simplest solutions. It requires little effort, a bit of imagination and as Hanna from Restlos Glucklich says: “saving the planet can taste so delicious”.