Covid-19 vaccine rollout delay hits chemists

The mass rollout to Australians has been pushed back, with pharmacists revealing they will not offer jabs until June.

Pharmacy Guild of Australia president Trent Twomey says there had been a one month delay in individual community pharmacies being involved in the rollout. Picture: Stewart McLean

The mass rollout of vaccinations to Australians has been pushed back by at least a month, with pharmacists revealing they will not start administering jabs until June, as experts warn the program’s reliance on GPs could create further delays in inoculating the nation from COVID-19.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison will use Friday’s national cabinet meeting to push for daily vaccine data to be made public, amid simmering tensions between the federal government and the states over the slowness of the rollout.

With the European Union blocking more than three million jabs from entering Australia, CSL revealed it has 2.5 million doses of domestically made AstraZeneca vaccine that “have now begun to be released”, with an aim to reach an output of one million doses a week “as soon as possible”.

But as the rollout becomes increasingly reliant on ramping up local production, Acting Chief Medical Officer Michael Kidd could not say when the federal regulator would green light all of the stockpiled jabs, or when CSL would reach its production target.

“We are going through our same rigorous processes with the Therapeutic Goods Administration with ensuring the safety and the quality of every batch of vaccine which has been produced by the CSL facilities,” Professor Kidd said.

Pharmacy Guild of Australia president Trent Twomey said there had been a one month delay in individual community pharmacies being involved in the rollout, with pharmacists now unlikely to start administering the jabs until June.

Pharmacists were scheduled to commence their involvement with phase 2A of the rollout in May, when eligibility is broadened to adults aged 50 and over.

“The next logical step is to activate community pharmacies to ensure we do have that widespread access. Most Australians, in fact 97 per cent of Australians, live within 2.5 km of a community pharmacy,” Professor Twomey said.

“Pharmacists manage supply chain logistics of medicines for a living. That’s what we do, and we can do it better than any other healthcare provider because we do it day in and day out, and that includes cold chain logistics.”

Former Dow Chemicals chairman Andrew Liveris, who is leading the Morrison government’s COVID-19 manufacturing task force, lashed out at the “badly handled” vaccine rollout and its refusal to prioritise mass vaccination centres.

“Our distribution should be more fine-tuned to using community centres,” he said.

“Why are we restricting it to just GP clinics?”

The mounting criticism comes as US President Joe Biden and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson accelerate the role of pharmacies in vaccine distribution in their nations, and open mass vaccination sites in stadiums, town halls and cathedrals.

Grattan Institute director Stephen Duckett said Australia’s vaccination program would only get back on track if pharmacists and mass vaccination centres were able to distribute jabs.

“At the moment we have got the states doing hospital and quarantine workers, we have got the Commonwealth doing aged-care centres, and GPs doing the rest of the population. That is just not a viable strategy,” Dr Duckett said.

“It should be GPs, and pharmacists, and mass vaccination centres rather than all of our eggs in one basket.

“A GP’s waiting room is too small to have large numbers of people going through.

“If you look at what is happening in the US, if you look at what is happening in the UK, they are using cathedrals, they are using town halls, they are using stadiums to get mass numbers done.”

But Professor Kidd rejected calls for US-style mass vaccination centres in Australia.

“We don’t need that sort of system because we are rolling out the vaccine very effectively through the systems that we already have in Australia,” he said.

The government halved its target from four million vaccinations by March when the EU started blocking vaccine exports. By the first weekend of April, just 841,885 people had been vaccinated.

Amid a rising blame game over the rollout, Queensland Deputy Premier Steven Miles accused the Prime Minister of attempting to distract people from “Brittany Higgins, rape and sexual harassment” in Canberra.

“There’s been a lot of issues around since the last national cabinet,” Mr Miles said.

“No doubt the Prime Minister will continue to try to use the vaccine rollout and COVID more generally to distract from the government’s other problems … Brittany Higgins and rape and sexual harassment.”

Additional reporting: Glenda Korporaal