Huge AstraZeneca stockpile open to the young

Daniel ­Andrews has joined the push to expand access to AstraZeneca for the young

Daniel Andrews says the only way out of the pandemic is mass vaccination. Picture: David Geraghty

Victorian Premier Daniel ­Andrews has joined the national push to expand access to AstraZeneca for younger Australians, as new figures revealed the two largest states were sitting on a stockpile of more than one million unused doses of the vaccine due to low demand.

The Andrews government ­announced on Sunday it would throw open access to 200,000 doses of AstraZeneca for people aged 18-to-39 at nine vaccination hubs in a bid to lift Melbourne out of its sixth Covid-19 lockdown.

The push comes as Cairns and Yarrabah in northern Queensland were plunged into a three-day snap lockdown after a mystery Covid case, while NSW recorded another 262 cases with restrictions being extended to Penrith as the Sydney outbreak spread from its Canterbury-Bankstown cluster.

The eight-day lockdown in southeast Queensland ended at 4pm on Sunday across 11 local government areas, but the ­nation’s east coast remained gripped by the fallout from the Delta outbreak, with about 12 million people stuck in lockdown.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said she would request federal financial assistance to support residents through the lockdown, and declared Cairns a hot spot, warning she was “very, very concerned about what is happening”

Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt said on Sunday the expected approval of the Moderna vaccine in coming weeks by the Therapeutic Goods Administration would bolster the vaccine stockpile by about three million a month from October through to December on top of the two million a week the nation was expecting in additional Pfizer doses.

He was confident this would lift vaccination rates to about two million a week, with the tempo lifting from nearly 700,000 jabs a week in June to nearly 1.3 million over the past week.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian also argued she was on track to achieve six million vaccinations by the end of the month – enough to ease restrictions on work and schools – with 4.4 million jabs administered so far, as state health authorities scrambled with arrangements to inoculate 24,000 Year 12 students in hotspot areas.

Ms Berejiklian rejected suggestions there was any inconsistency between her goal of easing restrictions once vaccination coverage reached 50- 60 per cent and the national cabinet agreement of achieving a 70 per cent threshold before the nation moved to the next phase of a four-step reopening plan.

“So long as we hit our vaccination targets, we can look for opportunities as to how we live in the month of September,” she said. “Freedom relies on vaccination, and there is no doubt about that, but it also means having to suppress the virus.”

Fresh data obtained by The Australian has revealed that weak demand for AstraZeneca has prevented NSW and Victoria from making substantial drawdowns on their assigned AZ allocations, with both states amassing a combined stockpile of more than one million unused doses since March.

Of the more than 911,000 ­AstraZeneca doses allocated to NSW, the Berejiklian government has ordered only 167,000, leaving a surplus of 734,000 doses available to be dispatched.

At the start of this month Victoria’s unused pile of AstraZeneca vaccines stood at more than 240,000, with thousands more available for dispatch from the federal government.

Mr Andrews’ push to soak up extra AstraZeneca by prioritising 200,000 doses for 18-39-year-olds followed a strong political push by Scott Morrison to accelerate inoculations for younger Australians despite ­opposition from some medical professionals, including Queensland’s chief health officer Jeannette Young.

Mr Andrews said on Sunday the only way out of the coronavirus pandemic was mass vaccination.

“There’s a lot written and a lot said about people being hesitant to get the jab. It’s not what I’m picking up on,” he said. “This is not like some parts of the US. We know about the power of getting vaccinated, whether it’s measles, mumps or rubella for our kids, HPV for young women, the list goes on and on,” he said.

“We’ve got a very successful history, as a state and a nation, of running broad vaccination programs. They work, they save lives.”

The AstraZeneca initiative, along with the launch of the ­nation’s first drive-through vaccination site at a former Bunnings warehouse at outer Melbourne Melton, comes as Victorian health authorities scramble to contain fresh coronavirus outbreaks across Melbourne’s western suburbs.

In Victoria 1,778,109 doses have so far been administered, compared to 1,657,342 in NSW.

So far more than 1.7 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered at state-run clinics and that number is set to escalate in the wake of the expanded AstraZeneca eligibility for young people.

Victorian chief health officer Brett Sutton said the vaccine had proven to be very effective in protecting from symptomatic illness, transmission and hospitalisation. “I’m a 52-year-old bloke. If I were 25 and AstraZeneca was the only vaccine available to me today I’d get it,” he said.

The Berejiklian government’s vaccination drive for Year 12 students in hotspot areas risks being derailed by booking system glitches and last-minute logistic disruptions, sparking concerns the mass immunisation of 24,000 students could take much longer than six days as previously scheduled.

Technical glitches have seen students waiting on the internet for hours unable to book a vaccine and reporting that the system has been rejecting their personal information.

In Queensland, Ms Palaszczuk advised people not to travel into the regions, warning the state was “not out of the woods”.