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Australia vows not to rush vaccine rollout, citing UK 'problems'

21 Comments
By Kiyoshi Ota

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It’s frustrating but understandable I guess as the US and UK situation is more serious than here, hence the faster approval/rollout of the vaccine.

JT, FYI, we don’t use ‘Premier’ to refer to the Prime Minister, that’s a term for state government leaders.

13 ( +16 / -3 )

Every country who can do so should be vaccinating now.

0 ( +7 / -7 )

The Australian premier? PM perhaps? I think so.

-1 ( +6 / -7 )

What problems exactly has GB encountered so far with the vaccinations?

13 ( +15 / -2 )

@Speed. Good question. The main problem seems to be not enough trained people available to vaccinate.

0 ( +5 / -5 )

JT, FYI, we don’t use ‘Premier’ to refer to the Prime Minister, that’s a term for state government leaders.

&

The Australian premier? PM perhaps? I think so.

Each Australian state has a Premier (upper case ‘P’), but ‘premier’ (lower case ‘p’) can be used as a synonym / substitute for prime minister.

Dictionaries can help with these issues.

4 ( +12 / -8 )

@bltvtzpk

I don’t need a dictionary, guarantee the word premier is never used for the PM.

From our electoral commission;

https://www.aec.gov.au/indigenous/files/iepp-factsheet-three-levels.pdf

-7 ( +5 / -12 )

I suppose they're just waiting to see if anything bad happens to the guinea pigs!

2 ( +6 / -4 )

From the leading Australian dictionary, Macquarie:

premier

/ˈprɛmiə/ (say 'premeeuh)

noun 1. (often upper case) (in Australia) the leader of a state government.

2. (often upper case) (elsewhere) a prime minister, or other head of government.

[French: first, from Latin prīmārius of the first rank]

From the Collins Cobuild dictionary

premier

(prɪmɪər  )

Word forms: premiers

1. COUNTABLE NOUN

The leader of the government of a country is sometimes referred to as the country's premier.

...Australian premier Paul Keating. 

Synonyms: head of government, prime minister, chancellor, chief minister  

I’m not arguing, but the author of the piece (AFP, not Japan Today) seemed to want to include a synonym, so went with ‘premier.’ I get that the Australian Macquarie dictionary adds ‘elsewhere’ for its use.

It’s kind of funny the Collins Cobuild provided ‘Paul Keating’ as an example of a premier - not me!

5 ( +8 / -3 )

Death is considered to be a serious side effect. A nurse in Portugal has died suddenly two days after receiving a shot of the vaccine(Pfizer/BioNTech one).

-4 ( +3 / -7 )

The Australian premier has for weeks said that mass-vaccination efforts in Britain, the United States and elsewhere would provide Australia with more data about the safety of the vaccines than clinical trails could.

The word "Australian premier" is incorrectly used for Scott Morrison, the Prime Minister (PM) of Australia. Under the current political system in Australia, there are six state premiers and two chief ministers of the territories.

P.s: I fully agree with AustPaul's comment, "I don’t need a dictionary, guarantee the word premier is never used for the PM."

-1 ( +1 / -2 )

Death is considered to be a serious side effect. A nurse in Portugal has died suddenly two days after receiving a shot of the vaccine(Pfizer/BioNTech one).

Not everything that happens after a vaccination is a side effect. If someone wins a prize in the lottery two days after being vaccinated is this a side effect?

-1 ( +2 / -3 )

"They're not testing batches of vaccines before they're disseminated across the population, is my understanding," Morrison said, insisting Australia would carry out such testing.

Then the chances of getting side effects would be higher then.

1 ( +2 / -1 )

AustPaul, cracaphat, Hung Nguyen

You appear to be getting your proper and common nouns mixed up. Premier (upper case P) identifies an individual and is a proper noun, whereas the common noun premier (lower case) in this case identifies a class of person, ie national leaders.

The usage in the article is correct.

Also, in this case the Australian premier (( ◠‿◠ )/) is factually incorrect. The UK is ensuring newly manufactured batches of vaccine are tested.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

@SwissToni - you are quite right. Lower case 'premier' is a generic term used for the senior political leader of any country.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

P.Smith, having a hard time clarifying that. The entries I can find for the common noun form only discusses senior political leaders. I think in this case where the man in the Australian big chair’s title is Prime Minister, I’m going to stand by the evidence that premier as used in the article is fine. Happy to leave an open verdict on the question of its use for a President.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

A premier in Australia is the head of a state. The head of the nation is the Prime Minister. While the term 'premier' may generically refer to a senior political leader, when you are speaking in a context where the term has a more specific meaning (the head of an Australian state), it becomes at best ambiguous, and at worse, incorrect.

It was a bad choice of wording.

-5 ( +2 / -7 )

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