Speaking to media, Kate Howitt said that Fidelity was keeping track of emerging virus strains in Brazil and South Africa through its healthcare analysis team but warned that anti-vaxxers could still kneecap the economic recovery.
“There is a bit of a concern that markets suddenly flipped to glass half-full with the vaccine announcement – ‘tick, there’s that problem solved’. We’ve done this in record time and got these out, but we haven’t had enough time to really watch and see,” Ms Howitt told media.
“The early indications we’re getting from places like Israel and the UK, where they really pushed fast on vaccination, are that you’re getting such a move towards herd immunity that even with the more virulent strains and even if some of the vaccines are a bit less effective, it’s still enough. I think the more pertinent issue is maybe the whole anti-vaxxer sentiment.”
Ms Howitt noted that consumer sentiment towards vaccination has been falling in Australia over the last six months and that without herd immunity the economy might not be able to open safely, saying “Australia does not have great community attitudes towards vaccination right now”.
“We’ve done incredibly well on inbound quarantine… we’ve done incredibly well on testing, we’ve done incredibly well on genomic sequencing, and we’ve done incredibly well on track and trace,” Ms Howitt said.
“There’s other countries that have done well on some of that, but we’ve done well on all of that. The real question for me here is how are we going to do on the ubiquity of vaccine rollout.”
Ms Howitt believes that Australians’ willingness to follow medical advice will limit the danger but that using “key opinion leaders” as part of a “charm offensive” will also be vital for increasing uptake of the vaccine.
“What enabled us to be so good on all of those dimensions is that we’re fundamentally a technocratic society,” Ms Howitt said.
“Our government said, ‘here’s the expert, we’ll do what they say’. Broadly, the population have bowed to that…mostly there’s still a big view in the community that we believe the experts and follow the experts, and hopefully that will follow through to vaccination.”
Hamish Douglass recently warned that investors face having “their shirts ripped off” by virus mutants that could be resistant to vaccines, saying “there is no margin for error in markets at the moment”.
