Why are we still waiting for travel bubbles?
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Why are travel bubbles between New Zealand and Australia still delayed?
This is an ABC podcast. Hello, this is Corona Cast, a daily podcast all about the coronavirus. I'm Health Reporter Tegan Taylor.
And I'm physician and journalist Dr. Norman Swann. It's Tuesday, the fifteenth of December.
And for anyone who has a loved person who lives overseas, which I think is most of us, uh, we're all kind of wondering when we can open up the borders again. And yesterday, Norman, we heard that New Zealand is okay with having a travel bubble relationship with Australia, but there's still some other hurdles that they want to jump through first. What's the delay and why aren't we seeing travel bubbles opening up with more countries?
Well, we could. I mean, interestingly, China could be one of the countries that we do. Singapore, we're down at very low levels. Taiwan, not South Korea anymore. Uh once upon a time you might have thought S South Korea. So there are a few places in the world, s the Pacific Islands, who are desperately in need of our tourism dollars.
How does the STI analogy explain the risks of creating travel bubbles?
So there are a few places which have uh either no virus or very, very small amounts of virus circulating. I don't know what New Zealand is waiting for. I mean we've got virtually no disease spreading in the community, no infection spreading in the community. We've got hotel quarantine, yes, but they've got hotel quarantine too. Maybe they just want to see us being tested again for a little while just to see how we were going in case we're lax about hotel quarantine. That might be what's going on there with New Zealand. But we could open up right now at a at incredibly low risk. The problem is
Okay.
Go on. Next to potty talk, this is my favorite No, so so really what we're talking about here is it's the old story about sexually transmissible diseases. When you have sex with somebody, you're actually having sex with everybody else they've had they've had sex with. And if they've got a virus or they've got something else, you can contract that.
Can mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines cause cancer by altering our DNA?
That's the problem here with travel bubbles, is that when you get into bed to use sexual analogy with uh a country You're getting into bed with all the countries they've got a relationship with in terms of their travel bubbles or how they do it. So New Zealand is is pretty safe. They're as strict as we are in terms of who's coming in and going into a hotel quarantine, and therefore you can be pretty sure that their border is not uh is not loose and therefore at risk. Singapore is another issue and the Pacific Islands are. If they are not careful about their borders, or somebody's not transit you've got to be careful if somebody's not just transiting through Singapore, and Singapore becomes a way station for people trying to get into Australia via the back door.
And that requires um just you got a filthy mind, Tegan. Just keep it to yourself. I had stopped that analogy a while ago, and you know you're just keeping on going.
You planted the sade in my head.
Anyway, that's the uh you know, that's the risk. So you've had to be sure that their border controls 'cause essentially it's only as safe as their borders. And if their borders are open, effectively you're opening the borders to Australia via whatever country we have the bubble with. So it's pretty safe with New Zealand, pretty safe with the Pacific Islands.
Why don’t the mRNA vaccines trigger the same cell changes as cancer‑causing viruses?
There's probably a quite a lot of negotiation before you do it with Singapore. I would thought it was very safe with Taiwan, very unsafe.
So something that everyone's eyes are on at the moment is of course vaccines. And we're getting a lot of questions about vaccines. And one of them is about mRNA vaccines, which we know work by basically in introducing a little bit of genetic material into the cell, tell the cell to make the spike protein of the virus so that then it can mount an an immune response against it. But because these vaccines involve genetic material and we know that cancer also involves genetics of a cell changing, the question is could these types of vaccines, these mRNA vaccines, cause cancer?
So this you know uh superficially it sounds like a question.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
Why are travel bubbles between New Zealand and Australia still delayed?
0:00–0:54
2
How does the STI analogy explain the risks of creating travel bubbles?
0:54–1:51
3
Can mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines cause cancer by altering our DNA?
1:51–3:08
4
Why don’t the mRNA vaccines trigger the same cell changes as cancer‑causing viruses?
3:08–4:29
5
Why are children still catching dozens of colds despite social distancing?
4:29–5:56
6
How does reduced flu transmission in adults contrast with high cold rates in kindergartners?
5:56–7:21
7
What are the key take‑aways and next steps for listeners of this Coronacast episode?
7:21–8:49