First Australian COVID-19 vaccines, from Pfizer, have arrived in Australia
The first shipment of COVID-19 Pfizer vaccines, 142,000 doses, have arrived in Australia and will be rolled out from Monday.
Health Minister Greg Hunt has confirmed that the first shipment of Pfizer vaccines have arrived in Australia.
“The advice that I have is that 142,000 doses have arrived in Australia. They will now be subject to security, quality assurance,” he said.
Mr Hunt said 80,000 doses of the vaccine would be rolled out from next Monday, February 22.
Mr Hunt said 60 per cent of those doses, 55,000 units, would be allocated to the states to ensure they could focus on vaccinating hotel quarantine workers.
He said the states would also focus on other frontline workers that are likely to come into contact with COVID positive international arrivals.
The Commonwealth will make 30,000 doses which will be made available to aged care facilities available for aged-care facilities, including centres located in rural and urban Australia.
Mr Hunt said Australia was on track to have four million people vaccinated by early April.
“We remain on track for the latest advice for all of the milestones we have set,” he said.
The Pfizer vaccines have been exported from Belgium, and arrived in Australia under tight security and be taken to a central distribution point.
The Therapeutic Goods Administration will now complete final testing of the vaccines to ensure quality before doses are distributed around the country on a per head of population basis. They’ll be taken to hospital hubs and directly to aged care centres.
Hospitals have been told to prepare for vaccinations to begin next week.
The Therapeutic Goods Administration carries out quality assessment of every batch of vaccine through a batch release process. Some vaccines have been batch tested prior to arrival. It will take the TGA within one and two days to test the remainder.
TGA teams with expertise in biotechnology, virology, molecular biology, chemistry, microbiology, biocompatibility and engineering check the composition, identity, potency and purity of the vaccines to guarantee safety and quality.
Mr Hunt earlier said the TGA would ensure every batch of vaccine was tested. “The safety of the public is the first priority,” Mr Hunt said. “It’s about making sure that no corners are cut.”
Distribution firms with specialist experience in cold-chain logistics have been contracted to transport the Pfizer vaccines, which must be kept at minus-70C to avoid the breakdown of the mRNA that contains the genetic instructions for the body’s cells to make the coronavirus spike protein.
The vaccines will arrive at the airport in special temperature-controlled thermal shipper boxes packed with dry ice, containing 5000 vaccine doses per shipper. The boxes will be equipped with GPS-enabled thermal sensors that will send alerts to a central control tower if the temperature in any of the boxes rises above minus-70C.
Aged-care centres will be able to store the vaccines in the thermal boxes for up to 15 days by refilling the thermal boxes with dry ice. Hospitals will store the vaccines in ultra-low temperature freezers.
Between 30 and 50 hospital hubs in urban and rural locations have been chosen to administer the vaccine. Border and quarantine workers will get the first jabs. A special vaccination clinic has been set up at Melbourne airport to vaccinate border workers.
High-risk frontline healthcare workers, including emergency department staff and ICU staff, will also be included in the first phase of the vaccine rollout. Aged-care residents and staff and disability care residents and staff are also on the priority list.
Vaccine doses will continue arriving at the rate of about 80,000 doses a week from early March. Pfizer has been contracted to supply a total of 20 million doses of vaccine to Australia.
The AstraZeneca vaccine will begin arriving in Australia in early March, with more than three million doses coming from Europe. The rest of the 50 million doses of AstraZeneca are being made locally by CSL in Melbourne.
The Pfizer vaccine is an mRNA vaccine and it works by inducing the body to make the coronavirus’s spike protein, which then elicits an immune response. The AstraZeneca vaccine is a viral vector vaccine which contains a genetically modified chimpanzee virus that carries the genetic code for SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein. When the chimpanzee virus infects the body’s cells, it triggers the cells to produce copies of the spike protein, which then generates an immune response.
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