Two million AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine doses sitting unused in fridges

More than two millions doses of Covid-19 vaccine distributed to GP surgeries are sitting in fridges unused as hesitancy over Astra­Zeneca drives vaccine wastage.

Queues were noticeably absent after a new mass vaccination centre opened at Macquarie Fields in Sydney’s southwest on Monday. Picture: Christian Gilles

More than two millions doses of Covid-19 vaccine distributed to GP surgeries are sitting in fridges unused as hesitancy over Astra­Zeneca drives vaccine wastage.

The federal government’s latest weekly vaccine rollout update shows that one in five of the doses administered to GPs so far is yet to be administered, with 2,315,343 of the available doses unused.

There are also hundreds of thousands of vaccine doses yet to be utilised in some states, with only NSW fully utilising its dose allocation.

There are 286,008 vaccine doses as yet unadministered in Victoria, which has utilised 94 per cent of its dose allocation from the commonwealth.

There are also 105,943 doses not yet utilised in Western Australia, which has administered only 91 per cent of its allocation.

NSW will now allow walk-in appointments at community clinics throughout southwest Sydney as authorities struggle to convince the public to take the AstraZeneca vaccine. AstraZeneca will be available without an appointment at clinics in Merrylands, Pemulwuy and Guildford.

GP clinics have also begun administering AstraZeneca to thousands of young people in Sydney after the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation urged people of all ages in Sydney to get vaccinated as soon as possible with whatever vaccine they could access.

Australia has now administered 11,211,447 vaccinations, with 1.1 million administered during the past week. Thirty-eight per cent of Australians aged over 16 have now had at least one vaccine dose, and 16.3 per cent are fully vaccinated. More than 77 per cent of Australians aged over 70 has now had at least one vaccine dose.

Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt said the states’ utilisation of available vaccine doses had been increasing every week, and was now 88 per cent across the country. “Also particularly with the GPs, with AstraZeneca, we are in many situations providing two weeks’ of supply and that can also be the case with Pfizer.

 

“We’re delivering in advance, so they are using them over a period of weeks. And what we’ve seen is that those utilisation rates have increased significantly.”

Mr Hunt refused to provide vaccine uptake figures by local government area, despite concerns that key suburbs responsible for much of the Sydney case numbers had low vaccination rates.

“As the vaccine program develops, we’ll have more detail and more data that’s available,” he said.

Associate professor at the Australian National University Shane Thomas said it was not clear whether some states were continuing to reserve vaccine for second doses, even though the commonwealth held second doses in reserve.