How Australia can get out of vaccine shortfall as 20 million doses ‘not enough’

While other countries are trading Covid-19 vaccines, a leading public health expert said Australia must double its order.

One of Australia’s leading public health experts has called on the government to more than double its order of Covid-19 vaccines, even if it means spending billions of dollars.

Bill Bowtell said the government’s promised allocation of 40 million vaccine doses was enough to cover 20 million people, but we “desperately need more”.

“It can’t just be 20 million people,” Mr Bowtell said.

“We’re going to have to look at vaccinating children, and there are going to have to be booster shots.”

Australia should be at least doubling its vaccine order and distributing any surplus to “countries in our region and around the world,” Mr Bowtell said.

“Australia has to get its act together and throw in big bucks, billions of dollars, that will help to vaccinate the world,” he said.

“It’s the right thing to do, but it’s also the only thing to do if we are going to return to some reasonably stable world in the next year or so.”

People wait for admission outside the emergency ward of a hospital tending to Covid-19 patients in Surabaya on July 11. Bill Bowtell says it is in Australia’s interests to ensure nations in our region are well vaccinated. Picture: Juni Kriswanto / AFP

Mr Bowtell’s call comes as the world grapples with critical vaccine shortfalls in some countries while others build up reserves.

South Korea today will start administering 700,000 Pfizer jabs it has borrowed from Israel. The loan – arranged on the basis that the shots were due to expire soon – is the first in what could be a complex series of deals and donations over the vaccines.

The prospect of Australia securing a deal with another country, as South Korea did, and having the vaccines delivered in the next month, was “pretty unlikely,” Mr Bowtell said.

The current shortfall in Australia’s vaccine supply was a “predictable mess” because we “didn’t order big last year,” he said.

Experts believe Australia could find it hard to cut a deal to access other countries’ surplus supplies because of our success in suppressing the virus to date.

Last week, the federal government announced it had succeeded in fast-tracking some of its allocation of Pfizer vaccines, but the worsening outbreak of the delta variant in Sydney has some experts wondering if more jabs need to be secured quickly.

A spokesperson for Minister for Health and Aged Care Greg Hunt declined to say whether any deals were on the table.

“Given the highly competitive international environment we do not identify or pre-empt specific international negotiations,” the spokesperson said.

Public health expert Bill Bowtell has been a vocal critic of some aspects of the federal government’s response to Covid-19.

Professor Stephen Duckett from the Grattan Institute. Picture: Supplied

Research from the US based Brookings Institute shows Washington could have a stockpile of 100 million surplus doses by October, and 500 million surplus doses by December.

The US has already loaned and donated millions of vaccines to Canada and Mexico under existing trilateral pandemic agreements. Washington has also donated vaccines to Brazil and Latin America. The UK is expected to have donated five million doses by September, prioritising poorer nations.

Former Health Department chief Professor Stephen Duckett said demand for Covid-19 vaccines “is way in excess of the supply, especially in NSW”.

“I assume the government will meet these targets that have just been announced and we will be swimming in vaccines in the next two months,” he said.

“If we can get some new vaccines tomorrow, that would be a great thing, because I think the demand on the 13th of July is in excess of the supply, but that may not be the case on the 13th of October,” Prof Duckett said.