Canberra: Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison has backtracked on comments he made saying that he planned to make coronavirus vaccinations as mandatory as possible.
“Can I be really clear to everyone? It’s not going to be compulsory to have the vaccine, OK?” Morrison said Wednesday 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.
