I'm really hoping that in twenty years we will not look back at these vaccines as one of the most impactful mistakes (or cases of corruption) of our century.
AstraZeneca was, IIRC, but its effectiveness against newer variants is pretty weak, to the extent of being pretty irrelevant, so it makes sense to withdraw.
I don’t think many people have ‘fled’ the land down under over the issues he brings up. Most folks here seem to think that the pandemic was handled pretty well compared to (for instance) the US or UK. Though that might be a WA thing. It may not though, for example the premiere of Victoria, despite having imposed lots of lockdowns that the wingnuts were very upset about, was recently voted back in with an increased majority.
(Edit — There does seem to have been an issue with motivated liars in other countries (USA) reporting exaggerations and falsehoods about the severity of it all though, for their own partisan gain. Stories about forced vaccinations at sports stadia, for instance.)
Personally I ‘fled’ the UK mid-pandemic to get here, though that was more for general quality of life reasons than anything specific to covid.
Oxford AZ at the beginning for the vaccination phase in Australia, already had the initial bad press - it meant many older people opted to go without even when Pfizer became available to the elderly, many still avoided a shot because of horror stories of older people arriving to get a mRNA vaccine, only to be told only Oxford AZ was available.
However Novavax eventually arrived but I'm unsure if it's available as a non booster.
Due to reasons, Oxford AZ was a non starter for me, but I had the luxury to wait for something else and in early phase, hoped any one of the existing widespread Chinese vaccines for the alpha strain might have been available in a limited amount. Something, even not the best, would be better than nothing. As it was, I was moderately lucky in our state ignoring the federal bunch and walled themselves off ... as best they could.
Disclaimer: I'm in Northern Australia and I waited for the mRNA types, given I'd already had most of the side effects listed as complications with Oxford AZ ... it slowly dawned on me I probably caught covid very early in 2020, hence all the similar weird side symptoms of Oxford AZ.
Within a very few years after its publication in '64 (?) that interpretation was inverted in common Australian usage, very much as a bit of a fuck you mate [2] to Horne and his Quadrant self aggrandizing intellectual crew.
Addendum: References found and added-