Was the debacle of the vaccine rollout always inevitable? Looking at the government’s track record, it’s hard to avoid the sense that it was never going to be done well. There’s no doubt a mass vaccination campaign is a complex, almost wartime-like challenge: source sufficient supplies, choose in advance between different options without clear evidence of efficacy or safety, and then get them to recipients via three separate distribution arms — primary health care, aged care and the state and territory health systems (the last, of course, being outside the control of the government). And all as quickly as possible.