[VIDEO] Ticker News
As the COVID vaccine rollout takes place globally, the strategies for large countries are going incredibly well while Australia lags behind in terms of the percentage of population vaccinated.
Bill Lang joined Jackson Williams from Ticker News to discuss the latest in the COVID vaccine rollout.
You can watch the segment via the following YouTube video or read the highlights of the transcript below.
Jackson Williams – Ticker News
As economies around the world rebound from the COVID 19 pandemic, what does it mean for small businesses? For more, we welcome Bill Lang from Small Business Australia. He’s here in the studio. Good to see you. Thank you, for your company, to that question that I just asked what does it mean for small businesses?
Bill Lang – Small Business Australia
Well, great to see you Jackson. Look, it’s great news, in terms of what’s happening globally, particularly in the big countries where their vaccination strategies are going incredibly well.
Jackson Williams
I hope you don’t consider Australia to be a big country.
Bill Lang
Well, we have over 25 million people live in Australia, I think we’re sort of coming about 100 on the league table at the moment in terms of percentage of population vaccinated, but like America, 290 million people, everyone will be vaccinated by the end of May.
Jackson Williams
We’ll head overseas in a second as part of the discussion, but here in Australia, with the vaccine rollout, I feel like there’s a lot of uncertainty amongst members of the community, there’s, I guess, very little confidence in how this vaccine rollout is taking place when it comes to the pace of it, when it comes to the communication or lack of communication between state and federal governments.
How is this rollout being received in the small business community? What’s the sentiment of people?
Bill Lang
I think the state of the rollout is not dissimilar to what was going on with lockdowns and things from the perspective of the pain of uncertainty is in many respects, far greater than the certainty of pain.
And that’s where we need more transparency, we need sort of a clear line of sight that sort of shows us you know, here’s how much supply we’ve got, here’s how many can be done each day, here’s how long it’s going to take.
So you think about the COVID number of tests, number of people tested positive, daily reporting, it would be great to see that level of factual reporting, so then people will know exactly where things are.
Jackson Williams
So that is something that you’re pushing for as a representative of many of these small business?
Bill Lang
Yeah, with respect to Small Business Australia we believe in things being simpler, fair, and therefore they’ll be better. So the clearer we’ve got information that we can see directly rather than soundbites more confident we’ll all be.
