AstraZeneca boss warns all states should embrace vaccine to ward against Delta

AstraZeneca’s Australian boss said lockdown-happy states should embrace her company’s vaccine as the Delta variant was coming for them “ready or not”.

The Australian boss of pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has warned states still not ­embracing her company’s Covid vaccine that the Delta variant “is like hide and seek, and coming ready or not”.

Liz Chatwin said increased AZ uptake in NSW and Vic­toria had been driven by the recent outbreaks and lockdowns and she believed other states would follow.

Regularly derided as the “second-class” option, Australia’s reception of the Oxford AZ vaccine had been a “surprise” and sparked moments of “confusion” and “frustration”, Ms Chatwin said.

“Waiting for Pfizer” has become such a common excuse for people not being vaccina­ted that even this week the mayor of Melbourne’s hardest-hit suburbs blamed lack of the mRNA vaccine for the spread in his community, despite plentiful supplies of AZ.

And Queensland’s chief health officer Jeanette Young’s insistent campaign against young people using AZ has been echoed by Premier ­Annastacia Palaszczuk.

Ms Palaszczuk’s Twitter account has since June contained a factually incorrect post that the UK government won’t allow under-40s to get AZ.

AstraZeneca Australia boss Liz Chatwin. Picture: David Swift

Rather than responding to the frequent attacks on AZ, Ms Chatwin said she would prefer to focus on how proud she and her team are that the vaccine is being produced at no profit.

Big pharma may be making trillions off the pandemic but the maligned option of AZ is not only 92 per cent effective against hospitalisation, it makes up 80 per cent of the vaccines that are being dona­ted to the developing world through the Covax program.

This decision to not profit from the pandemic was made “without hesitation” in the pandemic’s earliest days and Ms Chatwin said AZ bosses had no regrets despite Pfizer and Moderna announcing multibillion-dollar profits on the back of the global crisis.

“Right from the beginning, our whole focus with this pandemic was to do something to make a difference, to save lives,” Ms Chatwin said.

Aside from the vaccine, AZ has operated profitably in Australia for 64 years, selling a broad range of pharmaceutical products and prescription drugs and developed the first targeted breast cancer drug, Tamoxifen, 30 years ago.

Ms Chatwin said she was “really proud to say that we know from evidence in the real world … that this vaccine has saved hundreds of thousands of lives and prevented millions of hospitalisations”.

The Delta outbreak and shutdowns in NSW sparked a new vaccine urgency and ­increased uptake of AZ, with more than 10 million doses given there.

“Almost 80 per cent of all people aged over 70 in Australia have had at least a first dose of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine,” Ms Chatwin said.

“Almost 60 per cent are fully vaccinated. So we are so proud and we can see that we are keeping people out of hospital. We are helping people to ­continue their lives right here in Australia.”

Ms Chatwin said she believed politicians campaigning against the vaccine “obviously mean well” but Australians were increasingly overcoming their AZ hesitancy.

More than 1.2 billion people are immunised with AZ, and its inventor was given a standing ovation from grateful Brits at Wimbledon in June.

But early reports of a rare clotting condition cooled off backing from Australia’s political leaders.

The rare clots can be diagnosed by a free blood test at a GP and are easily managed in hospitals. Nine people have died from clotting linked to AZ in Australia while 1076 Australians have died from Covid.

Warning that Delta was “coming, ready or not” to states like Western Australia and Queensland, which have so far avoided big Delta outbreaks, Ms Chatwin said she expected far more Australians to put aside their reticence and avail themselves of “plentiful, safe supply”. “We see the level of hesitancy definitely falling,” she said.

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