Health Minister Greg Hunt said the vaccine rollout was ramping up and looked “very,very strong”,with thousands more GP clinics to begin vaccinating people in the coming few weeks.
“The latest guidance I have is we remain on track for all the first doses before the end of October,” he said.
The federal government has decided against declaring a hotspot over the Queensland outbreak so far,but the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee was meeting on Monday afternoon to discuss those developments.
The federal government has authorised asymptomatic testing across the Brisbane region including in aged care facilities,but Mr Hunt said he remains confident in Queensland’s ability to contain the outbreak.
“I think they’re in a strong position to protect Brisbane and Queensland and,thereby,Australia,” he said.
Mr Hunt said the Commonwealth had already provided Queensland with a “large inventory” of vaccine doses and so far would not be looking to send extra doses.
“We’re distributing everything that we can,” he said.
“Already we’ve distributed over 106,000 doses to Queensland and to their credit,they’ve already administered 59,000 of those,so there’s a significant amount which has been distributed just to that state.”
Opposition health spokesman Mark Butler said the vaccine rollout should be going much faster.
“The chaotic vaccine rollout is severely behind schedule,” he said. “The Prime Minister said 4 million Australians would be vaccinated by the end of March – we are two days away from that deadline and only 541,761 Australians have been vaccinated.
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“The opening of our economy is dependent on people getting jabs in their arms. The longer the wait the more lockdowns we’ll see.”
Victorian Opposition Leader Michael O’Brien said the rollout should have been faster.
“I think the vaccine rollout has been too slow and probably both state and federal governments[are] responsible for that,” Mr O’Brien toldABC Melbourneon Monday.
“The supply is in the hands of the federal government and logistical roll-out is in the hands of the state government but I’m not going to point fingers,there is more both could do.”
Professor McLaws said there were roughly 1.44 million healthcare workers in both phase 1a and phase 1b who needed to be vaccinated. In order to protect them all quickly,Professor McLaws calculated about 70,000 needed to be vaccinated each day.
“They’re going to have to start doing some big catch-up,” she said. “They might have done 260,000 doses in one week,but that’s what they should have done in one day.
“We have the vaccine in the country,we really don’t have an excuse for slow rollout at all for frontline workers.”