SA and WA shoot down NSW Premier’s desperate plea for vaccine supply

A desperate plea for help from NSW has been met with a harsh response from a leader who called the state’s lockdown ‘half-baked’.

West Australian Premier Mark McGowan has shot down a request from New South Wales to share coronavirus vaccine doses, hours after South Australia announced it had made the same decision.

Mr McGowan criticised NSW over its handling of the ongoing coronavirus outbreak in the state, and said the lockdown in Sydney was “half-baked”.

He said while WA would continue helping out with contact tracing, sharing Pfizer jabs was out of the question.

“I understand their problem, but we’re not prepared to give Pfizer over,” he told reporters on Friday.

He said while an outbreak of the Delta strain in WA was quickly “crushed and killed”, in his view NSW had struggled to do the same because the Sydney lockdown was not “draconian” enough.

“This is not a time for half-measures,” Mr McGowan said.

WA Premier Mark McGowan criticised NSW for it’s “half-baked” Covid-19 response. NCA NewsWire/Tony McDonough

Mr McGowan said he had explained to the other leaders at Friday’s national cabinet meeting what methods WA used to quash Delta outbreaks.

“We’ve crushed and killed it each and every time ... That's because we put all these measures in place that worked,” he said.

“You don’t have one set of rules for one side of the street and another set of rules for the other side of the street.

“If you go outside you wear a mask. If you mix with people, you wear a mask. You don’t have, sort of, difficult to explain rules about these things.

“If you want to go to the country, you can’t, unless you have an extremely good reason to have an exemption to go there. We had police roadblocks to stop people going out there.

“All these things are hard, and they’re draconian and they’re difficult, but that’s what you have to do if you want to get it under control.”

His comments came after SA announced it would block NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian’s plea for national vaccine supplies to be diverted to NSW as the state plunges further into Covid-19 crisis.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian is overseeing a Sydney lockdown that’s about to enter its fifth week. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Jeremy Piper

NSW reported its highest number of new locally acquired cases for the current outbreak on Friday with another 136 infections added and health authorities issuing a desperate pitch for help.

Chief health officer Kerry Chant said she was “recommending strongly” that all vaccine initiatives be redirected to the epicentre of the state’s outbreak in southwest Sydney and the Premier confirmed she would take the request to national cabinet on Friday.

“I think those are conversations we need to have,” Ms Berejiklian said.

But SA Premier Steven Marshall told reporters on Friday morning he would block the plea from his Liberal counterpart as his state grappled with an outbreak of its own.

SA was plunged into a seven-day lockdown on Tuesday evening and Mr Marshall said he was committed to rejecting any request that slowed down its pathway to easing restrictions.

“The hurt being felt by South Australian businesses and individuals is very high,” he said on Friday morning.

“We’ve got a national framework and I would suggest we stick with that.

“We have an equitable distribution on vaccination doses based on population — we’ve received our share and we need that share to continue.

“We don’t want to be put in a more vulnerable situation here in South Australia.”

SA’s Premier said the state’s Covid-19 update on Friday was positive. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Naomi Jellicoe

Mr Marshall didn’t rule out accepting a change in the share of vaccine supplies later in the month when SA had contained its outbreak and a greater supply of jabs had arrived in Australia.

South Australia reported one new case of on Friday, which was detected in quarantine and linked to a known cluster.

“It’s early days,” the Premier said.

“We’re day three of a seven-day lockdown but all of the early indications are positive and I’m hopeful that we will come out on seven days, as I said at the outset.

“We have cause for optimism but we’ve only got cause for optimism because of the great co-operation that we’ve had from the people of South Australia.”

SA is hopeful the lockdown ends on Tuesday. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Naomi Jellicoe

The update comes as SA health authorities grapple to contain an outbreak, with thousands in quarantine and about 100 close contacts of existing infections ordered into medi-hotel facilities on Thursday.

Chief health officer Nicola Spurrier said the new case was a man in his 60s who had attended a winery already known as an infection site, Tenafeate Creek Wines.

“But what made me very pleased when my team was giving me this briefing was that his first test was negative,” the Professor said.

“The time between being exposed and potential exposures on Monday are not an issue because he was not infectious in the community.

“He was quarantining at home with his wife, developed symptoms and did exactly the right thing.”

The man’s wife has since been transferred to a medi-hotel to be closely monitored by authorities given her escalated risk of infection.

Professor Spurrier said the new case was the eighth to be linked to the winery, which she described as a “super-spreading site”.

South Australia has 79 exposure sites on its alert list.

Originally published as SA and WA shoot down NSW Premier’s desperate plea for vaccine supply