Why Australia must go global in hunt for extra Covid vaccines - now

The US and UK are due to have millions of extra jabs as Australia faces months wait for doses that could end lockdowns forever

Australia must move urgently to secure more vaccine supplies from the US and other allies now or risk more lockdowns and economic damage well into next year, experts have warned.

According to an analysis published recently by the Washington think tank Brookings Institute, the United States could have as many as 767 million surplus vaccine doses by the end of 2021 including the Pfizer and Moderna jabs even if it vaccinated the entire US population age five over plus all of Canada and Mexico.

This figure increases to 1.2 billion if the US chose only to vaccinate every adult in the nation.

Professor Brendan Murphy at Parliament House. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Gary Ramage

While hundreds of millions of those jabs are earmarked for the developing world, calls are growing for the federal government to use its status as a close US ally to secure some of those doses to speed up Australia’s vaccine rollout and guard against any further interruptions in supply.

“I think Australia has to stop trying to fiddle with the figures and go cap in hand to our closest allies, the US and UK, and say, ‘What stocks can we get now?’”, said Troy Bilsborough, managing director of strategic policy consultancy Provocate.

“We have plenty of AstraZeneca that others are happy to take, even though we have damaged confidence in it here,” he said, referring to one in a million blood clotting events and undermining by Queensland health officials.

“We need more vaccines the public will trust and we should use our strategic importance in the Pacific to get what we need.

“I don’t know what the point of going to the G7 was if we were not going to walk away with more vaccines from Joe Biden.”

The government has said that from September some 32.6 million additional Pfizer jabs should be made available, but Lt Gen John “JJ” Frewen, who took control of the vaccine rollout last month, cautioned Tuesday that those numbers were a “forecast”.

Such cautious language comes after months of trouble for Australia’s vaccine rollout, which has included placing heavy bets on locally made AstraZeneca jabs at the urging of former chief medical officer Brendan Murphy, rather than diversifying supply lines like other countries had done.

Clinical Nurse Tim Neate administers a Pfizer vaccination to a client at the inner-city Covid-19 Vaccine Hub. Picture: Lisa Maree Williams/Getty

But Mr Bilsborough warned that while Australia’s economy had weathered the storm of the pandemic better than most other nations, all that could be in jeopardy if there were any further delays to the vaccination program and the reopening of the nation to the world.

“The big question in all of this is, putting aside the reopening of borders, is the impact on the budget deficit.

The federal budget’s projections rely on an end to lockdowns and not closing interstate borders, “but we’ve already done that three or four more times since the budget was handed down.”

While Lt Gen Frewen said that all options were on the table for getting jabs into arms including bringing employers into the process, others have questioned why local pharmacists are not being utilised to the same degree as they are in countries like the US and UK, where they have been on line since January.

At the moment no pharmacies are administering Covid vaccines in NSW, though 22 are slated to start giving out jabs on the 19th of July.

David Heffernan, president of the Pharmacy Guild of NSW, said that “1,250 pharmacies can start tomorrow”.

Long queues of people at the NSW Vaccination Centre in Homebush on July 1. Picture: Jenny Evans/Getty

The warning comes as experts in vaccine rollouts caution that the government must be more clear with Australians about the benefits of vaccination, and work harder to overcome hesitancy in the community.

“Supply is really holding us back,” said University of Sydney social scientist and specialist in vaccine uptake Prof Julie Leask, who said that “everyone is on the edge of their seat” waiting for the program to get the country back to some degree of normal.

“People are angry, part of this is for legitimate reasons, and part of this is because they don’t realise how difficult and complex a program like this is,” she said.

But with experts predicting that government modelling will demand that at least 80 per cent of the adult population be vaccinated before life can begin to return to some sort of normal with open borders and no lockdowns, “we have to be really clear about expectations.”

“It would be helpful if the government could paint a picture of what things will look like, and if we hit X number we get this, and if we hit Y number we get that.”

However, Prof Leask was doubtful that we would be able to hit more than 80 per cent by the end of the year, despite the government’s promise that everyone who wants a jab by then will be able to get one.

“By the end of the year we would be lucky to get to 60 per cent of Australians over 16 having had both jabs, mostly due to supply,” she said.

“But once we get that supply we can more confidently engage in activities to boost demand like incentives, ease of access, and targeted community campaigns.”