Only a “trickle” of vaccines have made their way into the arms of disability care residents — classed among Australia’s most vulnerable — as a result of complications with the aged care rollout, a Senate committee has heard.
Senators quizzed some of the country’s top health experts on Tuesday afternoon, revealing a delay to predicted shipments of Australia’s third vaccine and a May deadline for scientific advice on border reopenings but no update to the rollout timetable.
Department of Health associate secretary Caroline Edwards told the committee out of 25,000 disability care residents, only 1448 first doses had been administered and just 192 people were fully protected.
“I would hasten to add that we have deliberately focused on aged care residents and … we do not for a moment say it’s more than a trickle of vaccinations,” she said.
“And we are now working to gearing that up as the aged care residents program is nearing its completion.”
Vaccinating aged care residents “was a more difficult and lengthy process than we had anticipated”, leading to the prioritisation because of their greater COVID-19 risk, Ms Edwards said, in response to questioning by committee chair Katy Gallagher.
“I mean, I guess the concern I have is that this group is your most urgent group, as according to your rollout strategy,” Ms Gallagher said.
“This would be considered the most vulnerable of the vulnerable populations and eight weeks in … we’ve got six and a half per cent done.”
Health department secretary Brendan Murphy said the “vast majority” of priority healthcare workers had been vaccinated and border and quarantine workers in all but one state, which he didn’t name, were protected.
He wouldn’t commit to a new rollout timetable but confirmed the aim was still to have the country’s most vulnerable people — those in aged care, over 70 and with relevant chronic diseases — vaccinated by “the middle of this year”.
While those groups can mainly be served by locally produced AstraZeneca vaccines, concerns over extremely rare blood possibly linked to that vaccine mean the under-50s are reliant on international supplies of other jabs.
Professor Murphy insisted there was “plenty of Pfizer coming”, after the government upped Australia’s order to 40 million, but admitted the timing was still under negotiation and likely to be closer to the end of the year.
Ten million doses of Novavax, another vaccine candidate for which Australia has a contract for 51 million doses but is still in clinical trials, are now expected in the third quarter instead of the middle of the year.
Professor Murphy said the government was still in talks with other companies, such as Moderna, which supplies a very similar jab to Pfizer, but “unofficial” advice was that the drugmaker wouldn’t be able to supply doses until the fourth quarter of this year.
Beyond supply, vaccine hesitancy has emerged as a potential problem in the jab rollout.
“Even when we get a recalibrated plan, we are concerned about vaccine hesitancy with this issue with AstraZeneca,” Professor Murphy said.
“And we do need to collectively maintain confidence in the advice of our medical experts.
“There is some uncertainty about, you know, the uptake. We believe very strongly that AstraZeneca vaccine, taken according to the ATAGI (Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation) advice is highly effective, and is safe, and we are strongly encouraging people to use it, but we do have to factor that into our calculations.”
Chief Health Officer Paul Kelly said given Australia’s herd immunity was so low, thanks to successfully suppressing the virus, any decision to reopen borders would be closely linked to the vaccine rollout.
He said the department was working on modelling to that end, which would be presented to national cabinet “next month”.
The committee heard 1.7 million doses would have been administered by the end of the day, hours before the UK announced 10 million of its citizens were fully protected.
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