The Grattan Institute’s Stephen Duckett fears COVID vaccine shortage
Complacency is the enemy experts have warned, as Australia heads into winter with a lower than expected number of COVID vaccines administered.
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Complacency is the enemy experts have warned, as Australia heads into winter with a lower than expected number of COVID vaccines administered as another respiratory disease season approaches.
A combination of the tendency of people to spend more time indoors in close quarters during the winter months as well as the risk of the virus leaking into Australia from Papua New Guinea makes getting on top of the vaccine rollout more urgent than ever, according to Grattan Institute health economist Stephen Duckett.
“Any delay in the rollout is a bad thing, partly because there is always a risk of an outbreak as we saw in Queensland a couple of weeks ago, and of course there are new variants and we want to be ahead of them,” Dr Duckett told The Daily Telegraph.
“The delay is particularly important as we head into the winter months, and one we should all care about.
“There’s already been patients coming in to Australia from PNG and as we transfer patients in we bring those conditions with us,” he said.
Dr Duckett’s warnings come as NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian asked that people keep getting tested as the weather turns cold and the winter months approached.
Ms Berejiklian warned that there was a danger in the rest of the world opening up and leaving Australia behind.
“I don’t want to see our citizens left behind, because the rest of the world starts trading with each other and starts travelling,” Ms Berejiklian said Monday.
“We don’t want us to be left behind necessarily, so I’m really keen to get the rollout happening as fast as we can. I do have a sense of urgency about it, and we can’t take anything for granted. We’ve seen how volatile and how quickly things can change from the pandemic”.
“You might have zero cases for a long period and then suddenly you have an outbreak. And today we’ve managed to get on top of all of our outbreaks, but there will come a point in time when we could be really behind if we don’t accelerate what current plans might be.”
The Premier’s remarks came as Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly asserted that the government was still on track to hit its target of vaccinating Australia’s most vulnerable by the middle of the year.
“We will have more than 4000 GP respiratory clinics and aboriginal centres vaccinating this week, it has quadrupled in the last month,” he said.
“We continue to work with states and territories on the rollout … (the) first step was always to look at covering the vulnerable and those most likely to be exposed to the COVID-19 virus, by the middle of the year.”
Originally published as The Grattan Institute’s Stephen Duckett fears COVID vaccine shortage
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