VACCINE ARRIVAL
Federal Health Minister sets last week of February for rollout start to priority groups
AUSTRALIA’S V-Day is within reach at least.
Health officials have confirmed the first doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine will arrive in the country within days and start rolling out in one week.
In Israel the Pfizer jab is already proving hugely successful, with a new study of more than 523,000 vaccine recipients showing no one had died and only 544 people had contracted COVID-19 – just four of them with severe illness.
February 22 is widely tipped as the start date, with Health Minister Greg Hunt confirming the first shipment of 80,000 Pfizer doses would land in Australia before the end of the week, “if not earlier” to then undergo quality testing.
Mr Hunt resisted naming a specific day, but said priority groups in Phase 1A of the rollout would start to receive their first jab in the final week of February.
Mr Hunt said the 80,000 figure was a “minimum” and revealed the government had been working “quietly behind the scenes for more”.
“I’m cautiously optimistic that we may be able to do better than that but … I will not count any of these until they are literally in hand,” he said.
Mr Hunt said the first fortnight of the rollout would primarily focus on hotel and quarantine workers, as well as
disability, aged-care staff and residents, and frontline health staff.
Mr Hunt also revealed it was expected the Therapeutic Goods Administration would approve the AstraZeneca vaccine this week. This would trigger a shipment of 1.2 million doses of the jab from overseas to bolster the Phase 1A rollout, which is expected about six weeks.
The government has not confirmed how many doses of either vaccine is expected for the remainder of March. But from April, Australia will have one million doses of AstraZeneca from its domestically produced supply each week.
The government is also expecting at least one million doses from overseas per month for April, May and June. This would mean Australia had about 1.25 million doses of the two vaccines to administer each week as the rollout moved to Phase 1B and beyond.
Transport company DHL is prepared to start distributing the vaccines to vaccination to take hubs around the country as part of a complex cold-chain delivery system.
Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack on Sunday toured the Western Sydney facility where special fridges have been prepared to house the vials at -70C.
Reports from Israel, which has already distributed 6.2 million doses to its population, have suggested the vaccine has an efficacy rate of 93 per cent in a real-world setting.
“This data unequivocally proves that the vaccine is very effective and we have no doubt that it has saved the lives of many Israelis,” senior Maccabi Healthcare Services official Miri Mizrahi Reuveni said.
The UK is also well advanced with its vaccine rollout, with more than 14 million people having received at least one dose, about one in four adults in England.
Mr Hunt said Australia was slow to rollout the vaccine because it had chosen to do a “full and thorough” safety assessment.
“Safety leads on to confidence and the confidence leads on to uptake and uptake leads on to better protection,” he said. “Australians do not want us to cut corners, they do want a thorough assessment.”
Labor’s health spokesman Mark Butler has condemned the slow rollout, pointing out that even Zimbabwe has announced it would start vaccinating people this week.
KINGSCLIFF disaster alert company Aeeris has reported a return to profit, with wild weather and bushfires fuelling a surge in demand for the company’s early warning systems.
The company reported revenue of $845,684 for the six months to December 31, a 5.1 per cent increase on the same period last year. Net profit was $348,455 compared to a $184,468 loss last year.
Aeeris told the ASX that hailstorms, flooding and bushfires had resulted in unprecedented inquiries to the company, which operates the Early Warning Network. CEO Kerry Plowright (pictured) said, like much of the economy, business “fell off a cliff” when the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic began to be felt.
Despite the initial slowdown, Mr Plowright said the pandemic had proven a dramatic reminder for businesses to take control of disasters that were foreseeable.
“I think people should be looking at things to come,” he said. “Like a lot of businesses we had to focus on how to keep workflows going.
“But we found there is a heightened sense of risk that COVID has brought to the fore. I think a lot of businesses are now looking at those risks they can do something about.”
New customers included Chubb Insurance, CommInsure, Transport NSW, Hireup and Life Without Barriers.
Aeeris maps live data to monitor severe weather, fire, traffic and other hazards in real time, enabling clients to warn their staff or residents.
Mr Plowright said the company’s new products showed great promise for the remainder of the year, particularly its “globally unique” Climate Risk Analysis project.
Once complete, the platform would analyse vast amounts of data to provide unprecedented assessments of climate risks.
Another new product on Aeeris’s radar is a hail alert system, which uses high-resolution radar images to track the size and location of hail within a storm, enabling clients to warn customers.