JT's vaccine story

Transcript

JT Academy in partnership with Queensland Health visited remote First Nations communities within Queensland to share JT's vaccination story.

Jonathan is very passionate about all communities across Queensland, and right now, around keeping them safe. I mean, I admire working with you every day as a leader, but in this instance I was so proud when you said, 'let's get the plane together, let's put a doctor on board and let's go and give these communities what they're asking for', which is information.

Johnathan Thurston

Before I do start, I'd also like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land. My story is I've been double vaccinated. It isn't painful. It's quite easy and simple to get done. You know, I was a little bit skeptical when it all first came out. When I got home, I started to read a bit more about it and then went to my local GP to ask more questions.

And then, you know, the vaccination came out. Being a footballer, I couldn't deal with all the medical terms that he was telling me, so I was like, just break it down to me in simple terms, you know, if I get the vaccination, how's that going to protect me? What he told me was, on a scale of one to a hundred, if intensive care and death is 98 or 100, if you get vaccinated it will protect you that much, you'll only be like maybe a 10. So that was good enough for me to get vaccinated. I know that with our mob, we do have a lot of people that live under the one roof. It's important that we do get vaccinated so we can keep our families and our communities safe. So that's been my story.

For myself, you know, my culture lies at the very core of who I am as a person. I want to keep our people safe.

Dr Mark Wenitong

You're about 98% less likely to end up in intensive care or with really bad lungs and in hospital if you're vaccinated. What we found in New South Wales and that big outbreak with our mob down there was that the Elders had passed away all of them were unvaccinated and none of the vaccinated ones passed away. It's pretty strong evidence we've got here. The other thing is you're just less likely to transmit the virus as well if you've had the vaccine, so it means you're protecting other people as well and particularly if you are caring for older people and things like that.

This is the most amount of resources and money we've ever put into anything, a single thing to study it and get it right and we are able to do that very, very fast and it's still safe. So because it was very well tested and look, blackfellas are always saying to me, 'yeah, we tested it on blackfellas here' and I go, no look, it's been tested on 1 billion white people across the world.