States furious at ‘slow’ Pfizer vaccine talks

Scott Morrison labelled the opposition “heroes of hindsight” on Thursday as he defended the government’s negotiations of vaccine contracts.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. Picture: Ian Currie

State leaders have slammed the Morrison government for its handing of Covid-19 vaccine negotiations with Pfizer, as federal Labor accuses the government of being too slow to strike a deal.

Scott Morrison labelled the opposition “heroes of hindsight” on Thursday as he defended the government’s negotiations of vaccine contracts.

Labor on Wednesday released correspondence between the federal government and Pfizer executives it had obtained through freedom of information requests. The documents revealed Health Minister Greg Hunt did not accept an invitation made in June last year to attend a meeting with Pfizer’s senior executives in early July when the global race to secure supplies was on.

Instead, the government sent the Health Department’s first assistant secretary. The emails also revealed bureaucrats knocked back meetings with ­global executives from Pfizer last year because of concerns about signing a confidentiality agreement. The government’s first contact with Pfizer – for an initial 10 million doses – was signed in November.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews said if the commonwealth had acted faster to secure supplies lockdowns would be a thing of the past and Australia could have “taken advantage” of its reputation as the safest country in the world. “Wouldn’t it be better if we all had been vaccinated, 80 per cent double dose, back in March? There’d be no businesses failing, we’d be back to normal.”

ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr said it was frustrating “to learn we could have had more, sooner”.

The Prime Minister rejected Labor’s criticism that the government’s complacency had put Australia at the back of the vaccine queue. “I think there are a lot of heroes of hindsight at the moment out there,” he said. “As we learned in Japan, who signed an agreement of intention to purchase in July, their doses arrived three days before ours did. And if we look at, say, the situation in the United States, they went forward with an intention to purchase.

“They started their vaccination in December of last year, and right now in first doses we’re a couple of weeks behind them.”

Mr Hunt said the government had secured the Pfizer doses as soon as possible and the company had focused on providing supply to countries with higher Covid-19 rates. “There were no earlier doses available. That’s a myth being put out by Labor,“ he said.

Asked why he did not meet with Pfizer executives, Mr Hunt said that was the job of vaccine taskforce head Lisa Schofield. He said he had been “engaged” with Pfizer since May 2020 – months before the first official meeting.

Grattan Institute health program director Stephen Duckett, a former federal health department secretary, said Mr Hunt turning down the meeting demonstrated “he wasn’t giving acquisition of vaccines a high priority”. “This is not about hindsight,” he said.