Prime Minister Scott Morrison said his government has negotiated with Pfizer Inc. for millions of coronavirus vaccine doses to be delivered ahead of previous schedules, with the aim of offering every Australian at least one jab by the end of the year.
Pfizer doses will ramp up to about 1 million a week from July 19, more than double the weekly average of about 350,000 in June, according to a spokesperson for Morrison. That’s expected to deliver 2.8 million jabs this month, and more than 4.5 million in August.
“We’ve been working on this for some time to get those brought forward,” Morrison said in a separate Australian Broadcasting Corp. interview on Friday. “We really are hitting the marks we now need to hit. We’ve done a lot of catch up over the month of June.”
The increased supply will be welcomed by Australians growing weary of the country’s tardy vaccine rollout, which so far has seen just 26% of the population of about 26 million people get their first jab. Supply-chain hold-ups from contracted drug-makers have been among the setbacks, along with increased vaccine hesitancy due to concerns about rare blood clots from the AstraZeneca Plc product.
That forced Morrison to abandon an early target for full vaccination by October. The government has indicated the slow rollout would mean the nation may need to remain isolated well into 2022.
While Australia’s tough border restrictions have helped the country to avoid the waves of death and illness that last year wracked the U.S. and Europe, there’s been increased concern that the nation is ill-equipped to keep more virulent strains such as the delta variant out of local communities.
Sydney, the most-populous city, is in the midst of a lockdown that will last for at least three weeks. Just over a week ago, outbreaks forced half of the nation’s population into stay-at-home restrictions.
Alongside other so-called “COVID-zero” nations, such as China and Singapore, the persistent outbreaks show the limits of Australia’s strategy to beat the pandemic with closed international borders and rigorous testing. The Labor opposition says the delta variant is responsible for more than 20 virus leaks out of the nation’s quarantine hotels, with cases also linked to mineworkers and airline crew who have traveled around the nation.
Morrison’s spokesperson said the increased Pfizer doses come with a caveat: “Due to the nature of pandemic vaccine supply, these numbers are subject to change and will be confirmed closer to the delivery date.”
