Coronavirus vaccine rollout may take a year

Industry Minister says it could take up to a year for a potential coronavirus vaccine to be rolled out across the nation.

Minister for Industry, Science and Technology Karen Andrews during Question Time. Picture: Sean Davey.

Industry Minister Karen Andrews says it could take up to a year for a potential coronavirus vaccine to be rolled out across the nation if a formula is found to be safe and effective.

Ms Andrews said healthcare giant CSL was equipped to manufacture a protein-based vaccine straightaway, however a non-protein drug would take much longer and require “significant work” to distribute.

“I would hope that we would be able to do it in about the nine-month to 12-month time frame, but I think we need to be really conscious that with a vaccine, there are a lot of variables in there,” Ms Andrews told the ABC’s Insiders program.

“We don’t have the vaccine proven at this point in time, we don’t know what the base for that vaccine is going to be, so we are trying to prepare across a wide range.”

This month’s federal budget assumed a “population-wide Australian COVID-19 vaccination to be fully in place by late 2021” and that border restrictions and movement bans would be “progressively lifted”.

Pressed to confirm a timeframe to get production up and running if a non-protein vaccine was approved, Ms Andrews said it was impossible to answer.

“I know that you want me to say categorically this is what the timeframe is going to be, but I don’t believe that there is anyone that can answer that question,” she said.

Ms Andrews said the commonwealth through the CSIRO was providing assistance to CSL to help ramp up its manufacturing capability.

She conceded that just $40m of the $1.5bn the Morrison government has committed to its medical technology and manufacturing plan would be spent this financial year, triggering an attack from Labor the funding was “too little, too late”.

Opposition industry spokesman Brendan O’Connor said delaying the spending of promised funds would mean the recession would be “deeper and longer”.

Health Minister Greg Hunt assured Australians the nation was still “very strongly placed” to secure access to and produce a potential vaccine.

“We’re in a strong position, we’re progressing, there’s never a guarantee,” he said. “Each day the evidence is stronger and the proximity to distribution of that treatment is closer.”

Mr Hunt cautioned the protein-based vaccine candidate being developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford still remained “on track” for rollout next year and the government’s vaccine delivery timeframe remained unchanged, declaring “Australia is on track for first quarter (2021) commencement of that rollout”.

The separate molecular clamp vaccine being developed by the University of Queensland was also expected to be “available during the course of next year – about the middle of the year” and the government was “highly advanced” in securing access to other vaccine candidates.