COVID vaccination rollout warning: States may need to take over and create mega-clinics
Australia’s shambolic vaccine rollout is 3.5m doses behind schedule with Victoria’s Health Minister conceding authorities need to lift their game.
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Australia is 3.5 million doses behind schedule in its COVID-19 immunisation rollout, sparking calls for the states to take over the vaccination program.
In the wake of the bungled attempt to meet immunisation targets, multiple health experts warn Australia is rapidly falling behind other nations.
Compounding the problem is the failure to administer the 2.4 million doses we have.
The nation will on Thursday miss the original target of inoculating four million Australians by April with the latest data showing just 670,349 people were vaccinated by midnight on Tuesday.
Experts warn it will be almost impossible to meet Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s new target of “distributing” six million vaccines by May 10.
To meet that target an average 170,000 people a day would have to be vaccinated. But since GPs began the shots last Monday the rate is just a fifth of what is required at 31,000 jabs per day.
The federal government will supply only 500,000 doses each week for the next 3½ weeks.
Many experts say the current design of the GP rollout means there are nowhere near enough shots for the entire population and we will “miss the window of zero infections”.
They’re calling on the government to look at mass clinics being run overseas in venues such as sports stadiums and cathedrals in Britain and drive-through clinics in the US.
Victorian Health Minister Martin Foley conceded Australia’s vaccine rollout was flawed, but said the states had been forced into the arrangements by the Commonwealth and had no choice but to make the best of a bad situation.
When asked if Australia’s vaccine program would work better if the divide between federal and state authorities was abolished, Mr Foley said:
“Of course it could work better,”
“Some of the issues that you have raised, that the AMA have raised, that the GPs have raised, that the colleges have raised, are all perfectly legitimate and would probably be best served if all levels of government addressed them together.
“We can all lift our game and the first thing we can do to do that is to stop playing politics.”
A day after his government ordered Royal Melbourne Hospital medics to stop vaccinating eligible elderly Victorians because they fall under the federal program, Mr Foley said states had been forced to sign up to the arrangements in order to gain any vaccine supplies.
“They were the rules set - my position is that I have to make it work,” Mr Foley said.
“I am obliged under the stuff that is allocated to the state to do particular groups in the community.
“I have nothing but sympathy for the way the Royal Melbourne staff responded, but that is not the way the system is designed in this instance.
“That agreement makes it clear who does what, and in what priority.
“We pointed out to them - all the states pointed out to them - that for 70 years vaccination programs have been delivered by the states.
“For all sorts of reasons … the Commonwealth decided they are going to deliver direct to GPs, disability services, the vast bulk of vaccines in this country.”
Latest data shows the Federal Government was allocating 78 per cent of Victoria’s vaccine stocks for its program, with the state-run program receiving 22 per cent.
Mr Foley said the uncertainty of supplies was hampering state rollouts.
“It is not just a problem the state is facing, it is a problem GPs are facing, it is a problem anyone who wants to deliver the vaccines is facing,” Mr Foley said.
“I have some sympathy for the Commonwealth trying to source vaccines on a global market. They clearly had expectations that they would have four million vaccinations out in the market by today, and that has not happened.
“It will be challenging to see if their next goal of having achieved that by the end of April.”
Mr Foley demanded the Federal Government stop putting politics ahead of vaccinating Australians.
“We should all put down our swords,” he said.
“Today has been a very unfortunate set of circumstances with data that the states have not seen, that has not been provided to us, being rolled out with a number of Federal Ministers and a COVID Commissioner all seemingly at the same time being highly critical of the states.”
The Prime Minister said on Wednesday he was not interested in a “tit-for-tat on vaccines” with states.
“What Australians want is for people to get vaccinated, governments to work together,” Mr Morrison said, adding it was “not a race”.
Grattan Institute health expert Stephen Duckett said issues with international supply chains highlighted by the PM could be blamed for part of the problem but added “there’s another million doses in the country which aren’t in people’s arms”.
“We could be doing much much better,” he said.
“You just can’t do a mass vaccination strategy through general practice,” he said. “You have to do mass vaccination centres.
“My daughter is in the UK and they’re using cathedrals and stadiums.”
He argues there are three serious problems with a slow rollout — breaches in quarantine, the issue of new variants coming in, and the longer it takes to vaccinate, the longer it will take to open up the economy.
“It’s not as if it’s a surprise. We’ve had a long time to prepare for this,” he said.
Melbourne GP Joe Garra, whose clinic receives just 50 doses a week, is calling on the feds to allow a group of doctors to band together to open their own vaccination hub.
Along with 15 other nearby doctors, Dr Garra wants to use a local public building and set up a bigger clinic to speed up the rollout.
“We are working all the solutions around doing it safely and not wasting vaccine doses,” Dr Garra said.
RWANDA’S DOING A BETTER JAB THAN OZ
Rwanda might have a life expectancy of 68 years compared to Australia’s average of 82, and its average annual income is just $525 a year, compared to our full-time worker salary of $76,000.
But the struggling African nation of 12 million has still managed to get more of its citizens vaccinated against COVID-19 relative to its population than Australia has.
The war-ravaged country has a rate of 2.69 vaccinations per 100 people compared to Australia’s 2.12.
Other countries putting our jab rates to shame include Lebanon on 2.84, Bangladesh on 3.23, Indonesia on 3.94, Azerbaijan on 5.03 and Mongolia on 8.51, according to the UK government’s official vaccine tracker.
“Every other comparable and non-comparable country has done far better than Australia,” says Professor Bill Bowtell, from UNSW.
“We’re somewhere between Albania and Ghana. Since President Biden came to office they have vaccinated over 100 million people. They are vaccinating the entire population of Australia every 10 days.”
At the other end of the scale, the tiny nation of Gibraltar is absolutely hitting it out of the park, coming first in the league of nations with its rate of vaccinations delivered — 174 jabs per 100 people, taking into account the fact that the jabs include the second shot required.
Israel, with a population of 9 million, has the second highest rate in the world, at 115 shots, followed by many small island countries including the Seychelles, the Cayman Islands, the Falklands, the Isle of Man and Bermuda. The US figure is 43.6 and the UK is slightly ahead of them on 50.26.
On the other hand, Australia is doing remarkably well internationally in terms of deaths.
We’ve had 909 to date, which pales into insignificance against the worst nation in the world — the USA, which so far has lost 550,121 people to COVID-19.
JAB ROLL OUT FALLING WELL SHORT, NO JOKE
If it weren’t so serious – it could easily be an April Fools joke.
Four million Aussies were promised they would be vaccinated by April 1 – but to date just 670,349 people have received the COVID-19 jab.
On Tuesday Australia had at its disposal an estimated 2.479 million doses of vaccine.
But half of the vaccines have been set aside for second doses, leaving 1.23 million that could be injected.
“We hope by the end of February — end of March, I should say, to have reached some 4 million population. That is a target. That is what we are working to,” Prime Minster Scott Morrison said at a press conference in Canberra on January 7.
Two months later the Prime Minister conceded Europe’s decision to ban exports of COVID-19 vaccines meant Australia could not meet the four million vaccinated by April target.
A power point slide from an official vaccine briefing given by Mr Morrison and Health Department chief Professor Brendan Murphy showed the timeline for “distributing” the four million jabs would be pushed out to between April 19 and 26.
Almost 6 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine would be “distributed” by May 10, the same slide showed.
Distributed means the vaccines will be out of the warehouse and in GPs’ fridges, in hospitals or the hands of those providing vaccinations in aged care.
It does not mean they will necessarily be in the arms of Australians.
If all those vaccines are to get into people’s arms by May 10 an estimated 133,000 doses will need to be injected every day over the next 40 days.
To date the best we have done is just over 72,000 doses in a single day.
This compares to the US where this month the seven-day average of vaccines administered hit 2.7 million.
On March 24 Health Department chief Professor Brendan Murphy conceded it was unlikely all Australians would receive two doses of the AstraZeneca jab by October, some may not get their second dose until December.
The vaccination rollout through GPs hit a huge snag when the government surprised GPs by announcing it would begin five days earlier than scheduled without informing general practices or their software developers.
The online booking system used by 64 per cent of GPs was still in the process of upgrading its software to cope with vaccine appointments at the time the announcement was made.
As a result GP phone lines went into meltdown as people raced to get a vaccine appointment only to be disappointed.
“We were told that bookings needed to be ready to go by on the 22nd of March,” Charles Beaton, of GP booking service HotDoc’s said. “We came to work on Wednesday the 17th to be told, it’s actually gone live overnight.
“And so of course, thousands and thousands of people are calling clinics to try and make appointments and clinics didn’t have any certainty around doses. That was why the first few days went into meltdown.”
HotDoc said online bookings are now working and 140,000 vaccine appointments have been made.
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