Australia’s vaccine push will start in mid-February, a month earlier than Scott Morrison anticipated

PM aiming to have four million of the nation’s most vulnerable people inoculated before Easter.

CSL’s manufacturing facilities in Broadmeadows, Melbourne. Picture: CSL

Australia’s COVID-19 immunisation program will begin in February, a month earlier than originally expected, with 4 million of the nation’s most vulnerable to be inoculated by Easter.

Health authorities will begin to distribute the Pfizer vaccine to as many as 50 sites across the country in mid-February, making it available first for quarantine workers and aged-care and ­disability staff and residents.

The immunisation program will eventually expand to more than 1000 distribution points, with CSL confirming that locally manufactured vaccine doses will be available from April.

Scott Morrison said the immunisation program, the biggest medical exercise in the nation’s history, would “add a very significant further defence and offence” against the coronavirus but warned it was “not a silver bullet”.

“We anticipate, optimistically, that we would hope to start the vaccination with 80,000 people a week,” the Prime Minister said on Thursday.

“This is going as quickly and as safely as possible.”

The new vaccine rollout date, after the government spent weeks resisting an acceleration of the program, came as Australia recorded its first local transmission of a new, highly infectious British strain of the coronavirus.

The Queensland woman in her 20s, a cleaner at a quarantine hotel, contracted COVID-19 from a traveller, prompting warnings for those in the Brisbane suburbs of Sunnybank Hills, Algester and Calamvale to get tested.

Separately, West Australian authorities confirmed three workers in Perth may have been exposed to the British strain — considered to be up to 70 per cent more infectious — after failing to properly wear protective equipment while interacting with an elderly traveller from London.

There were no new local transmissions recorded in Victoria or NSW on Thursday.

The acceleration of the vaccination program came after weeks of Labor attacks on Mr Morrison’s handling of the rollout, with ­Anthony Albanese demanding immunisation as soon as the Therapeutic Goods Administration granted approval.

Mr Morrison and Health Minister Greg Hunt said the decision to bring vaccinations forward was not due to political pressure, but because the government had received assurances about the logistics of drug supply and with the TGA increasing the pace at which it was working towards approvals.

 

“We’ve been able to get confirmation the Pfizer data will be available, confirmation the TGA will therefore be able to assess at potentially an earlier time frame,” Mr Hunt said. “Confirmation that the shipping arrangements are all on schedule means we can provide a confident time frame.”

Mr Morrison had previously called the Labor leader’s push to accelerate the vaccination program “dangerous”.

Mr Albanese said Thursday’s call was “common sense”.

“It is good that the government has seen common sense, even though it was saying that call was dangerous just a few days ago,” he told 2GB radio. “Given the TGA was saying for some time that they expected to approve the Pfizer vaccine in January, there was never any ­reason for us to delay it until late March.”

The vaccination program will roll out with five different phases over the course of the year.

The first vaccinations will focus on 678,000 quarantine and border workers, frontline healthcare workers in priority areas and aged-care and disability care staff and residents.

More than 6.1 million people will then become eligible for the second phase — those aged over 70, other healthcare workers, Indigenous people over 55, younger people with underlying medical conditions and critical workers in defence, emergency services and meat processing.

The third phase will cover anyone over 50 and Indigenous ­people over 18, while the fourth will include the balance of the adult population. About 5.6 million people under 18 will be vaccinated on the recommendation of health officials.

The limited number of locations at which the Pfizer vaccine will be available is due to the need to transport doses at an extremely cold temperature.

The AstraZeneca vaccine, which will initially be shipped to Australia but later manufactured by CSL locally, is significantly cheaper and easier to transport.

CSL, in a statement, said it had completed “the first batches of bulk drug substance — the active ingredient used to make drug product — at our Broadmeadows biotech manufacturing facility”.

“The quality review process will take approximately four weeks before proceeding to the fill and finish step, and finished product will be then subject to regulatory approvals,” it said.

Health Department secretary Brendan Murphy — who has led the COVID-19 response — said: “Nearly half the population are actually covered in those initial priority populations [including] a number of people who may not be considered at high risk but might be frontline workers.”

Raina MacIntyre, an epidemiologist at the Kirby Institute, said the accelerated program was “excellent news”.

“It is critical we vaccinate everyone working at the international border with the best available vaccine — not just hotel quarantine staff, but also transport staff, air crew, airport workers,” Professor MacIntyre said.

“They are the most likely vectors of infection into the community — if they are well protected with the best vaccines, we can take a breath and wait for the broader community rollout.”

Menzies Institute research fellow Andrew Flies said: “The best weapon against COVID-19 remains social distancing and masks, but vaccines offer powerful disease prevention tools, particularly for workers at inter­national arrival and quarantine locations.”