Coronavirus: Pharmacy Guild asks for right to give jab

Pharmacists says Australians could be vaccinated three months earlier than current estimates if community pharmacies were given the green light.

Greg Hunt. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Pharmacists say the Covid-19 immunisation program could be accelerated by three months if they could administer the vaccines.

Modelling prepared for the Pharmacy Guild of Australia suggests without their involvement, the expected time to vaccinate everyone aged 16 or older could take a further 408 days.

That compares to 241 days if around 4000 community pharmacies – already classified as “suitable” to deliver the vaccines – are included in the program.

More than 50 pharmacies in rural Queensland will begin administering the Covid-19 vaccine from Monday following a national cabinet decision on April 22 that allowed the states to decide if they wanted to use them in the immunisation program.

However, only the Palaszczuk government has allow pharmacies to deliver the vaccine.

Trent Twomey, the Pharmacy Guild’s president, said political leaders had failed to use the sector to speed up the sluggish rollout.

“It’s just beyond belief that we are not using the thousands of pharmacies at our disposal to get millions of vaccines out of fridges and into people’s arms,” he said.

“It’s not an issue of training, infrastructure, supply or consumer confidence – all this is, is bureaucratic red tape which is slowing down the process towards herd immunity.”

The modelling considered two scenarios – one with 3930 pharmacies and one without – and concluded total cost for the program would be lowered by $77 million if the sector was included.

“This is additional to the economic benefits of achieving target vaccination coverage of the total population approximately 17 weeks earlier than would be the case without community pharmacy involvement,” the guild document reads.

Health Minister Greg Hunt on Sunday said a record number of Australians had been vaccinated over the past week.

“It’s already a record week six days into the week,” he said. “At this point, it’s 772,752 Australians who have been vaccinated, so over three-quarters of a million Australians vaccinated in six days. This means that over 5 million vaccines have now been delivered in Australia – 5,016,000 vaccinations have occurred.”

Scott Morrison on Friday said there would be a significant revamp of the vaccination program, appointing Lieutenant General John Frewen to oversee it.

Speaking after a national cabinet meeting, the Prime Minister said people aged 40 to 49 would be eligible for the vaccine from GPs and clinics nationwide.

Community pharmacists have also lobbied the Victorian government in recent weeks to allow them to administer the vaccinations as the state-run centres are hit with lengthy queues.

Mr Twomey said while there was an initial issue with vaccine supply during the first stage of the vaccination program, millions of doses were now being produced and procured each week.

“We know from international examples in the developed world that pharmacies have been used to administer jabs and achieve much higher rates of community vaccination,” he said.

“We’re very excited the first pharmacies will be activated in rural Queensland and that the Palaszczuk government have committed to a phased rollout. What we haven’t had is a commitment from other states and territory jurisdictions to do the same.”

Mr Twomey said community pharmacies were on standby and would be a better alternative than mass vaccination hubs.

“It makes no sense when you have a highly contagious epidemic like the coronavirus to encourage people to cluster in large numbers in large locations like hospitals and footy stadiums when you can have a decentralised approach done in localised settings in a much safer way.”