Coronavirus: Europe stops AstraZeneca vaccine exports putting Australia’s order at risk
AstraZeneca vaccines will not leave Europe until the company makes good on promised deliveries, putting Australia’s order of 3.8 million doses at risk.
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The European Union has declared AstraZeneca COVID-19 jabs will not leave the bloc until the vaccine manufacturer makes good on promised deliveries.
“I think it is clear that first of all the company has to catch up, has to honour the contract it has with the European member states, before it can engage again in exporting vaccines,” EU chief Ursula von der Leyen said at a news conference after an EU summit dominated by the bloc’s struggling vaccination rollout.
The crackdown puts the federal government’s international order of 3.8 million AstraZeneca doses at risk, and comes after Italy in recent weeks blocked a shipment of 250,000 doses destined for Australia.
Ms von der Leyen’s blunt words on the UK-Swedish company threatened to deepen a row with Britain, which is looking to secure AstraZeneca shipments from the EU to fill an abrupt hole in its supplies that are threatening its previously smooth jabs programme.
Brussels and London have both laid claim to vaccine stocks in an AstraZeneca factory in the Netherlands.
London has bristled at Ms von der Leyen’s European Commission this week toughening rules on vaccine exports to include assessments on how well countries such as Britain are doing in terms of vaccinations compared to the EU.
A joint statement by the British government and the commission on Wednesday (local time) said both sides are looking for ways to cooperate towards a “win-win” compromise, but no details were given.
PNG TO RECEIVE AUSTRALIAN VACCINES, VARIANT FOUND IN QLD
A new coronavirus strain from Papua New Guinea has been detected in Australia.
Queensland Health has confirmed the existence of a Papua New Guinea variant of COVID-19.
“From 1 January to 25 March 2021 … Queensland Health has been notified of 64 cases of COVID-19 in people with a history of travel in or transit through Papua New Guinea,” Queensland Health said.
“Currently the variant most commonly detected in travellers from Papua New Guinea is the B. 1.466.2 lineage, which is not a lineage of concern.
“This is the new name for the specific B. 1 strain mentioned as circulating in PNG.”
The PNG variant is believed to be less contagious than the UK and South African strains.
It was confirmed in Queensland via genomic testing on arrivals in quarantine.
It comes as reports emerged that Australia would send tens of thousands of locally produced vaccines to Papua New Guinea from its Melbourne factory as it grows more concerned that vaccines from Europe and India won’t arrive in time to contain the worsening COVID-19 outbreak in the Pacific nation.
According to a report in Nine media, PNG was due to receive 600,000 vaccines under the global initiative known as COVAX by the end of May but rising infections have prompted governments in India and Europe to halt exports to deal with their own health emergencies.
Australia is lobbying for vaccines to be sent to PNG within the month, but blocks around the world give rise to fears that shipments could be delayed for several months.
Meanwhile, Queensland’s largest public hospital will bring dozens of extra beds online to cope with the high numbers of positive COVID-19 cases travelling into the state from Papua New Guinea.
Interim head of mission for Doctors Without Borders, Doctors Without Borders, in PNG, Ghulam Nabi, said hospitals there were struggling with COVID-19 cases tripling “in a matter of weeks”.
“Increasing numbers of healthcare staff are testing positive,” Mr Nabi told The Courier Mail. “They have to isolate and can’t go to work.
“Various healthcare services have been restricted and the remaining staff are concerned as they expect a major disruption to healthcare services.”
AUSTRALIA’S VACCINE GOAL ‘PATENTLY UNACHIEVABLE’
The Government’s promise to vaccinate four million people against COVID-19 by April was now “patently unachievable” because there was not enough vaccine, federal health department chief Professor Brendan Murphy admits.
Senate Estimates has been told the government has only been able to import 700,000 doses of the 3.8 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine it ordered.
This means just over 300,000 Australians have been vaccinated so far.
However, after 800,000 locally produced vials of AstraZeneca’s vaccine were released this week the vaccination program would now ramp up, Professor Murphy said.
“The next four weeks we will see an exponential rise,” he said.
However, he refused to say how many people the department now expected to be vaccinated by the end of March.
The government is also planning mass vaccination clinics when it gets to the third stage of the vaccine rollout, Prof Murphy said.
Once the federal government finished vaccinating people in aged care homes the remaining doses of Pfizer vaccine would be given to the states to distribute through mass vaccination clinics, the department has told senate Estimates.
The government has ordered 10 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine which requires just three weeks between doses whereas the AstraZeneca vaccine has a three month delay between doses.
Meanwhile the department concedes it has begun the second stage of its COVID-19 vaccine rollout even though it has vaccinated only half the people in the first stage of the rollout.
Aged care residents and frontline health and other workers were meant to be the first people to receive the vaccine but the Department of Health said it is now running the first two stages in parallel.
This means people aged over 70 and those with chronic conditions, emergency service workers and others who are in the second stage are being vaccinated before every aged care resident has been vaccinated.
The department refused to give a timeline on when it would complete the first stage of the vaccination telling Senate Estimates because there were new aged care residents and workers every day it might never end.
Under fire for causing a phone meltdown in GP practices when it announced the names of the first 1,000 clinics dispensing the vaccine the department said it had notified GPs the vaccine booking system was going live.
FIRST BATCHES OF AUSSIE-MADE ASTRAZENECA CLEARED
The Therapeutic Goods Administration approved batches of the Melbourne AstraZeneca vaccine on Tuesday night, kicking off Australia’s first locally made COVID-19 vaccine.
More than 830,000 doses were cleared after the TGA approved the release of the first four batches.
The Australian-made batches have been tested to guarantee they were free of any contaminants and had “exactly the same composition and performance as the overseas-manufactured vaccine, the same quality”, according to a statement from the TGA.
The approval is a “major step in Australia’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic”, the TGA said.
The internationally-produced AstraZeneca vaccine was approved last week but local production will speed up Australia’s vaccine rollout, which has been criticised for being slow and vulnerable to bans from the European Union.
In the coming months, 50 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine will be made in Broadmeadows and distributed into vials at Parkville.
Each batch will be tested before being released.
It comes as officials remained confident supply would continue to expand in the coming weeks.
“We’ve been encouraged by the 4000 GPs who have now received vaccination approval, which will come online as vaccine supplies increase to 400,000 doses over the coming weeks,” deputy chief medical officer Michael Kidd said.
“The government had initially hoped at least 2000 practices would participate and we are delighted this has grown to over 4000.”
According to a report in The Australian, Sydney GP, Nicole Fogarty, said her clinic was “ready and raring” for the vaccine rollout to begin at 9am on Monday with almost 1000 patients booked to receive the vaccine in coming weeks.
“We received our first batch of doses on Friday and we feel like we’re on target and prepared for Monday,” she told The Australian.
“We were taken by surprise last week by the online booking system (HealthEngine), but we’re fortunate that we’ve got a strong IT team, so we could set up a fantastic online booking system that we can control and manage.”
Dr Fogarty said the clinic was “not worried about the current levels of supply”.
– with Melissa Iaria/NewsWire and AFP
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