O'Keefe: How the push to vaccinate against COVID-19 has done damage to the credibility of vaccines 04:46

Now, it was interesting to hear Dominic Perrottet, former New South Wales Premier, say that mandating vaccines was the wrong thing to do. He said it was wrong and it was a mistake. I reckon good on him. And I'll tell you why. At least he's being honest, Dominic Perrottet. He was just telling the truth. And it got me thinking. 60-odd percent of the world's population ended up being vaccinated against COVID.

Did it make us any healthier? And what was the consequence to public health? So I did some digging on it. There's an article from The Lancet. It's titled, Assessing the Impact of Mass Vaccination Against COVID-19, a Retrospective Analysis. And it provides a pretty thought-provoking look at the effectiveness of mass vaccination programs during the COVID pandemic. Now, after examining the data and considering various outcomes...

It seems that, according to this Lancet article anyway, in hindsight, a more targeted approach was probably a better strategy than the broad mass vaccination efforts that we ended up implementing. As in when we realised as a community that almost all healthy people were likely to not need hospitalisation once they caught COVID. You weren't going to get that sick if you were healthy if you caught COVID. Once that was pretty apparent to us,

The focus from our public health officials and governments should have been on just protecting the elderly and vulnerable. The mass vaccination campaigns, they were launched with the best of intentions. Don't get me wrong. It was aimed to curb the spread of a virus and protect as many people as possible, a virus we didn't know a whole lot about. And while these programs did help reduce severe cases and deaths, the article suggests at least that their overall impact might not have been actually as significant as initially hoped.

The vaccine didn't do all that much for us. If you have two jabs and a booster and still catch the virus and you were never really going to get sick, why did you need two jabs and a booster? You didn't. And the Lancet makes that point.

And one major point from the article, I think that benefits of mass vaccination programs, particularly in younger and low risk populations, the benefits were somewhat limited. And that's because these groups were less likely to experience severe illness from COVID-19. And thus the direct impact of vaccination on their health outcomes was less pronounced.

But the vaccines showed clear benefits in reducing hospitalizations and deaths amongst older adults and those with health conditions. We knew that, right? So that is where the focus should have been. As soon as we knew that your Pfizer or your AstraZeneca or whatever it was, wasn't going to stop you giving the virus to somebody else.

The purpose of mass vaccination and mandated vaccination was wrong, was a mistake, as Dominic Perrottet made the point. So optional jabs for the general population, combust with a robust strategy for protecting the vulnerable, would have been the right way to go about it. Now, there have been 13,000 claims for vaccine injuries in the United States.

Blood clots have killed otherwise young and healthy people who got AstraZeneca. People ended up with Bell's palsy and myocarditis from Pfizer and Moderna. And I think we got ourselves in a situation where we have gaslit people to say that all these vaccine injuries are somehow a figment of their imagination. And I think that was unfair and unjust. This entire program has done huge damage to the credibility of all vaccines.

That's just the truth. Look, I am pro-vaccine. I will always get a flu jab. And I'll ensure, don't worry about that, that Henry is up to date with his. They work and they are almost always effective.

But when it comes to having a bit of reflection like Dominic Perrottet has, I think we all need to take a step back and understand that what we were told about mass vaccination from COVID was a stretch. Sure, we didn't know what COVID was capable of at first, but when we started to get a picture of it, I think that belittling and blasting our friends and family and these government mandated medical treatments was not the way to go. And just like Dominic Perrottet, I'll put my own hand up.

I thought I was part of some big public health push. And in the end, I was wrong.