No excuse for slow vaccine rollout to healthcare workers: experts

Australia needs to rapidly speed up the vaccination of all healthcare workers, health experts have warned, as the Queensland outbreak shows the current rollout pace is not fast enough.

There were four new locally acquired cases reported in Queensland on Monday morning, with fears COVID-19 may have spread from Queensland into NSW after two people travelled to Byron Bay while unknowingly infectious.

Health Minister Greg Hunt on Monday.Credit: Joe Armao

Those two new cases – a nurse working on a COVID-19 hospital ward and her sister – visited Byron venues popular with holidaying Sydneysiders before they tested positive for the virus.

The new cases take the latest Queensland cluster to seven. One of the new cases could also be the link to a Princess Alexandra Hospital doctor who was infectious two weeks ago.

More than 540,000 vaccines had been administered across the country by Sunday evening, and 259,000 of those were administered in the last week. But Epidemiologist Professor Mary-Louise McLaws said that was simply not enough.

“This vaccine rollout has to be done ASAP for all high risk and healthcare workers, there’s just no two ways around it,” she said.

Associate Professor Julian Rait, the Australian Medical Association Victoria president, said there was no excuse for healthcare worker infections.

“[It’s] nowhere near fast enough. No excuses as it should have been completed by now - transmission to health care workers is now completely preventable,” he said.

Health Minister Greg Hunt said the vaccine rollout was ramping up and looked “very, very strong”, with thousands more GP clinics to begin vaccinating people in the coming few weeks.

“The latest guidance I have is we remain on track for all the first doses before the end of October,” he said.

The federal government has decided against declaring a hotspot over the Queensland outbreak so far, but the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee was meeting on Monday afternoon to discuss those developments.

The federal government has authorised asymptomatic testing across the Brisbane region including in aged care facilities, but Mr Hunt said he remains confident in Queensland’s ability to contain the outbreak.

“I think they’re in a strong position to protect Brisbane and Queensland and, thereby, Australia,” he said.

Mr Hunt said the Commonwealth had already provided Queensland with a “large inventory” of vaccine doses and so far would not be looking to send extra doses.

“We’re distributing everything that we can,” he said.

“Already we’ve distributed over 106,000 doses to Queensland and to their credit, they’ve already administered 59,000 of those, so there’s a significant amount which has been distributed just to that state.”

Opposition health spokesman Mark Butler said the vaccine rollout should be going much faster.

“The chaotic vaccine rollout is severely behind schedule,” he said. “The Prime Minister said 4 million Australians would be vaccinated by the end of March – we are two days away from that deadline and only 541,761 Australians have been vaccinated.

“The opening of our economy is dependent on people getting jabs in their arms. The longer the wait the more lockdowns we’ll see.”

Victorian Opposition Leader Michael O’Brien said the rollout should have been faster.

“I think the vaccine rollout has been too slow and probably both state and federal governments [are] responsible for that,” Mr O’Brien told ABC Melbourne on Monday.

“The supply is in the hands of the federal government and logistical roll-out is in the hands of the state government but I’m not going to point fingers, there is more both could do.”

Professor McLaws said there were roughly 1.44 million healthcare workers in both phase 1a and phase 1b who needed to be vaccinated. In order to protect them all quickly, Professor McLaws calculated about 70,000 needed to be vaccinated each day.

“They’re going to have to start doing some big catch-up,” she said. “They might have done 260,000 doses in one week, but that’s what they should have done in one day.

“We have the vaccine in the country, we really don’t have an excuse for slow rollout at all for frontline workers.”