Epidemiologists warn 95pc Australians need coronavirus vaccine to fight mutant strains
Up to 95 per cent of Australians need to be vaccinated to combat virulent coronavirus strains, with global immunisation at least six years away, experts have warned.
Up to 95 per cent of Australians need to be vaccinated to combat virulent coronavirus strains, with global immunisation at least six years away, leading epidemiologists and infectious disease experts have warned.
Epidemiology and University of NSW academic Mary-Louise McLaws said vaccines were not a silver bullet but they were the only weapon the world had against the virus, and Australia needed to rollout as many as 190,000 injections a day to achieve herd immunity.
“My calculations are that we need to vaccinate at least 90 to 95 per cent if we’re covering a variant of concern,” Dr McLaws told the National Press Club on Wednesday.
“If we’re not, we need to cover at least 85 per cent of the community, but I’d actually think about trying to do as many as possible … if people don’t get vaccinated at all, they have no chance of developing immunity.”
Under Dr McLaws’s target scenario, about 20 million Australians could be vaccinated by October.
As exclusive Newspoll conducted for The Australian this month revealed that 75 per cent of voters would definitely or probably get vaccinated — well below the numbers specified by Dr McLaws.
One in four said they would refuse vaccination or were undecided about the jab, indicating a significant level of scepticism in the community.
Dr McLaws was joined on the panel by infectious disease specialists Robert Booy and Sanjaya Senanayake, who called for international “vaccine altruism” rather than vaccine nationalism, saying based on current estimates, the world would not achieve a global immunisation coverage of 75 per cent for at least six years.
“Only about 70 nations have started to vaccinate their populations and at the current rate of vaccination, it is estimated we won’t reach global coverage of 75 per cent with vaccines for about six years.
“Not one or two years, but six years,” Dr Senanayake said.
Asked whether they were satisfied that the World Health Organisation team investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic had been given enough access when carrying out the probe in China, the panel said it was highly unlikely the virus had originated in a lab.
The WHO delegation on Tuesday left open the possibility that the disease originated in a region other than Wuhan and said the introduction of SARS-CoV-2 via an intermediary animal host was the “most likely” cause.
Dr McLaws said it was likely the disease originated in animals and climate change would accelerate the emergence of new virus strains.
“It might have come from the wild,” she said.
“As the climate changes, we may see more of the sort of moving of diseases of the animal world into the human world more often.
“So we really need to respect both the climate and our nature,”Dr McLaws said.
Dr Booy backed the work of one of the WHO investigators, Dominic Dwyer, saying he trusted that the Australian professor would have given a reliable report.
However, he cautioned that it was clear that information in China was not always readily available.
“Others have said that access to information in China is limited,” Dr Booy said.
“That’s just how it is and so trying to determine what went on 15 months ago is rather difficult, and being taken to a wet market now is almost immaterial.”
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