Goal on Covid-19 jabs more than year away

Australia will not reach a target of having five out of six adults fully vaccinated until November next year unless the current rate of vaccination is dramatically sped up.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian in Sydney on Tuesday. Picture: Gaye Gerard

Australia will not reach a target of having five out of six adults fully vaccinated until November next year unless the current rate of vaccination is dramatically sped up.

Analysis of the pace of the ­nation’s current vaccine rollout by the Blueprint ­Institute think tank has found that Australia would have to increase its rate of vaccination almost to the same level as the US and the UK to have five in six adults fully vaccinated by the end of December.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said on Monday that she wanted to see five out of six adults in the state vaccinated before the international border was opened.

But at the current pace of vaccination, the border reopening would be pushed out well beyond mid-2022, which is the timeframe flagged by the federal government.

“The UK, US, EU and Canada are currently rolling out vaccinations around three times quicker than Australia,” said Luke Heeney, a policy and economics researcher with the Blueprint ­Institute who compiled the projections. “For us to fully vaccinate five in six adults by the end of the year, we’d need to match that pace by the second week of August.

“If we wait until the final quarter to do so, the rollout will blow into 2022, finishing in February at the earliest. Given this, a closed border until mid-2022 is not a crazy proposition.”

Australia is unlikely to be able to increase the pace of the vaccine rollout to match the US and UK pace by August because of supply constraints with the Pfizer ­vaccine.

Supplies of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines will be plentiful towards the end of the year.

The country will then need a rapid ramping up of its program in order to have five in six adults ­vaccinated in the early months of 2022, said Blueprint Institute chief economist Steven ­Hamilton.

 

“It’s hard to imagine a really significant increase in our pace until October,” Dr Hamilton said. “The current pace is just very slow. We’re vaccinating at a slower pace than Europe, and Europe is significantly behind the UK and the US.

“We need to prepare for a massive influx of doses later in the year. The big unknown that we don’t know about yet is how many Australians are going to be vaccine hesitant.”

Although Australia is progressing more slowly than ­Europe, it is outperforming Japan, New Zealand and South Korea.

Australia has now administered 3.1 million doses. Victoria is leading the country.

GPs have administered more than 1.7 million vaccines, and 125,775 people living in aged care are now fully vaccinated.

A total of 5.5 million vaccine doses have been distributed around the country, with a total utilisation rate of 77 per cent. But Queensland’s utilisation of the doses it has been supplied is below other states at only 64 per cent.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk blamed the slow rollout of the vaccination program on the “decentralisation” of the state and said she was satisfied with the state-run program.

She said the rollout would soon ramp-up with vaccination clinics being set-up across regional Queensland.

“I am satisfied because we are very decentralised and I think once we have the vaccination hubs, it will pick up,’’ she said.