VaxTaker Dan grabs lion’s share of states’ Covid vaccine supply 

Victoria has received more Covid-19 vaccines than any other state of territory Picture: NCA NewsWire / Luis Ascui

Not all states are equal in the Covid-19 vaccine supply stakes, nor in their rollout performance.

As the cumulative number of vaccinations pushes past 10 million, Australia has a horizontal vaccine imbalance: NSW and Queensland have been short-changed by around 560,000 doses.

Now that vaccination is a race, the Blues and Maroons are starting way behind scratch.

Given their best-in-show jab efficiency, it means half-a-million more people in those states could have been vaccinated if they had been allocated per capita supply in line with the national average.

The loudest voices of pandemic parochialism in the national cabinet zoom, Victoria’s Daniel Andrews and Western Australia’s Mark McGowan, might have secured generous vaccine allocations but they are the stragglers in getting shots into arms.

At the beginning of last week, the two jurisdictions were sitting on 63 per cent of the near 700,000 unused doses held by states and territories, even though they account for a combined 36 per cent of the population aged 16 and over.

Scott Morrison was denounced by the Andrews government as the “Prime Minister for NSW”, but the Premier State has been under-supplied in the allocation of doses for its own clinics.

NSW has received 1.24 million doses, enough to cover 19 per cent of the eligible population, the lowest per capita supply in the nation. If NSW had been allocated doses at the national “jurisdiction delivered” average of 25 per cent of eligible population it would have got almost 400,000 extra doses.

By Saturday, NSW clinics had administered 1.18 million doses, or 18 per cent of the eligible pool.

Victoria, which has 1.1 million fewer eligible people than NSW, has got 1.71 million doses, which is equivalent to 32 per cent of its citizens aged 16 or over. State clinics have administered a cumulative 1.38 million jabs, or 25.5 per cent of eligible Victorians.

Such skewed supply doesn’t look like a “double standard” or “having to beg for every scrap of support from the federal government”, as a Victorian operative alleged after the Prime Minister launched a NSW rescue package.

Canberra has supplied to WA doses equivalent to 25 per cent of its eligible cohort. WA has administered 19 per cent of population cover, compared with the national benchmark of 21 per cent.

Vaccine supply per state - graph

Queensland has got a slightly better deal than NSW. The state has received doses equivalent to 21 per cent of its 4.1 million eligible population and has administered jabs to 19 per cent of them. Its allocation has been almost 160,000 doses below par.

If Gladys Berejiklian and Annastacia Palaszczuk had Vax­Taker Dan-level state supplies, NSW and Queensland would have secured an extra 840,000 and 440,000 doses, respectively.

Canberra’s Vaccines Operations Centre announced a bring forward to NSW of 300,000 doses to cope with demand due to the Delta-strain outbreak, but has left it to NSW officials to determine how much of it, split equally between Pfizer and AstraZeneca shots, will go to state clinics.

So far, in a rollout that began on February 22, state and territory clinics have been responsible for 4.37 million jabs, with 5.69 million completed through the commonwealth’s primary care, aged-care and disability programs.

Those in charge of the rollout maintain supply is equitable and made on the basis of age profile and eligibility. NSW has a median age of 37.9 years, compared with Victoria’s 37.1 and WA’s 37.5. Queensland’s 37.7 median age is bang on the national average, below that of South Australia (40.3) and Tasmania (42.3). The ACT (35.9) and NT (33.5) are the youngest jurisdictions.

On a per capita basis, the most generous allocation of vaccine doses has been to the smallest jurisdictions: Northern Territory (56 per cent), Tasmania (37 per cent), and ACT (36 per cent)

When Victoria imposed a lockdown in late May, it was able to secure a supply boost and its state-run hubs did a roaring trade. But its vaccine utilisation rate is the lowest in the land.

Across state and territory rollouts, estimated dose utilisation is 95 per cent; in Victoria, it’s 90 per cent, while WA brings up the tail at 86 per cent. NSW and Queensland have fully utilised supplies, while the ACT and Tasmania are just behind them. South Australia is at 93 per cent, the NT at 87 per cent.

In per capita terms, the ACT and NT have the highest number of doses administered, with first and second doses across all rollout programs, equivalent to two-thirds of their eligible populations.

Bringing up the tail is Fortress WA with a score of 44 per cent. If the nation moved at Sandgroper pace, the vaccine “strollout” would be more than one million jabs behind its latest milestone.

WA is lagging the nation on first and second doses in every published age breakdown: 16 and over, 50 and over, and 70 and over.

While the federal rollout of the vaccine program, mainly through GPs, has administered 57 per cent of all doses, it has taken delivery of 61 per cent, or 8 million of the 13.1 million doses distributed.

Almost 80 per cent of the national stockpile of 3.2 million unused doses (the difference between “available” and “administered” and including wastage), is sitting in the fridges or bins of GPs and other providers in the federal program.

That’s the supply blackhole nobody is talking about. Officials are refusing to disclose state breakdowns of primary-care supply.

A spokeswoman for the Health Department said in primary care, it allocates and distributes vaccines “to ensure equitable distribution across Australia based on a number of factors, such as the per-capita population for each jurisdiction and the estimated eligible population across cohorts”.

More supply should be going to the states that need it and want it and know how to use it quickly.