Australia PM walks back "mandatory coronavirus vaccine" comments

PanARMENIAN.Net - Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison has backtracked on comments he made saying that he planned to make coronavirus vaccinations as mandatory as possible, CNBC reports.

“Can I be really clear to everyone? It’s not going to be compulsory to have the vaccine, OK?” Morrison said Wednesday, August 19 on Australian radio station 2GB.

Morrison thought there had been a bit of an “overreaction” to the comments he made earlier that day on Australian radio station 3AW, when he stated that he expected to make a vaccine “as mandatory as you can possibly make it.”

He said there would be “a lot of encouragement and measures to get as high a rate of acceptance as usual.”

The Australian leader has since said, however, that there are no mechanisms in place to ensure coronavirus vaccinations are compulsory for Australian citizens. “We can’t hold someone down and make them take it,” Morrisson told 2GB later in the day.

He also sought to stress that any potential vaccine would be required to pass all trials and “be as safe as any other” existing immunizations in Australia before being administered.

Earlier that day on 3AW, Morrison had suggested there would only be exemptions on medical grounds.

He argued that there needed to be the “most extensive and comprehensive response” to the coronavirus in order “to get Australia back to normal.”

Australia has had 23,993 reported cases of Covid-19 and 450 deaths, according to the latest figures compiled by Johns Hopkins University.