Moderna Covid vaccine to be available in mid-September while Victoria offers AstraZeneca to over-18s
The Moderna vaccine will be available in Australia from mid-September adding to the country’s use of AstraZeneca and Pfizer, the Morrison government says.
The announcement on Sunday came as the Victorian government revealed it would make AstraZeneca available to people aged 18 to 39 at nine of its state-run clinics and set up Australia’s first drive-through vaccination hub.
Australian governments are continuing to battle winter Delta outbreaks with the New South Wales premier, Gladys Berejiklian, confirming 262 new local Covid cases and the death of an elderly woman, taking the cluster’s death toll to at least 28.
The Queensland government, meanwhile, confirmed that a lockdown would end in 11 local government areas in the state’s south-east but a new coronavirus infection in a taxi driver prompted a snap lockdown in Cairns.
The federal health minister, Greg Hunt, told the ABC the government’s “expectation” was the first million doses of the Moderna vaccine would be available in the middle of September, assuming approval from the Therapeutic Goods Administration.
The number of all vaccine doses available in Australia is scheduled to peak in November, with almost 19m doses on offer that month, comprising 10m Pfizer, 5m AstraZeneca and 4m Moderna, an updated campaign plan states.
Australia’s chief medical officer, Prof Paul Kelly, said Moderna had been approved around the world and was essentially an mRNA vaccine similar to Pfizer. Approval here was just “a matter of time”, he said on Sunday.
Hunt said TGA approval of Sotrovimab – a treatment used for some Covid patients – was also expected in the next fortnight. The federal government has bought 7,700 doses of the antibody treatment.
Kelly said the treatment would be administered predominantly to Covid patients who were not vaccinated.
“It will be mostly for people who are at highest risk of severe disease, and it needs to be given early in the treatment course,” he said. “So it will be very useful in certain circumstances, but it’s not for everyone.”
Hunt also confirmed on Sunday the Morrison government would allocate an additional $17.7m in mental health support for people battling through protracted lockdowns. The health minister encouraged Australians to remain hopeful and to seek help if they were finding conditions difficult.
While the case numbers in NSW on Sunday were lower than on Saturday, Berejiklian said new suburbs around the Penrith local government area were now areas of concern.
Berejiklian declared getting vaccinated was a “race” and she urged residents to come forward. “We are really keen to really sprint,” the NSW premier told reporters. “This is a race. We are keen to get those vaccination rates up”.
In Melbourne, the Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, confirmed another 11 cases in the state with all of the new infections linked to the Hobsons Bay cluster.
Andrews said he wasn’t yet sure when the current lockdown would end because health officials were still trying to identify the origins of the current outbreak. But he said the state had “options at this point [and] I want to retain those options”.
Referencing the larger outbreak in NSW, Andrews said: “There are other parts of the country that don’t have those options.”
“They are locked in until they all get vaccinated,” the Victorian premier said. “We can have a different reality here, we can have something very different, but
we have to remain focused on the days and weeks to come, all of us doing the right thing.”
Berejiklian argued NSW could contemplate an easing of restrictions once vaccination rates hit 50-60% of the adult population even though work from the Doherty Institute suggests that would be a risky strategy.
“As long as we get 6m jabs by the end of August, we can look for opportunities as to how we live in the month of September,” the she said on Sunday.
Hunt said Berejiklian was not at odds with Canberra, other state leaders, or the Doherty modelling when expressing that aspiration because she was talking about “incremental changes” rather than abandoning the lockdown.
Asked whether it would be reasonable to ease restrictions in the circumstances the NSW premier had articulated, Hunt said: “They have to judge it on the circumstances, and in terms of individual measures, we’ve always respected the rights of each particular state to make their decisions.”
Asked whether the lockdown should stay until 70% of the population was vaccinated, Hunt said there had been a “misunderstanding” in the discussion about the options. He said the options had been presented as binary – “either it’s on or it’s off” – when it was possible the state would move through transitions.
The Doherty epidemiological modelling, which underpinned national cabinet’s plan to transition to “Covidnormal”, suggests that until national vaccination rates reach 70% any outbreaks would probably see “rapid and uncontrolled” growth, leading to a significant number of deaths and severe cases.
The work says once vaccination coverage reaches 70% and 80%, the rate of severe infections is reduced, but under an “uncontrolled outbreak” scenario, between 1,300 and 2,000 people would still die from 10,000 to 20,000 severe infections within six months.
The Queensland government on Sunday congratulated people in the state’s south-east for complying with recent restrictions. But the premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, said people needed to continue to wear masks and practise social distancing.
“I think Queenslanders should be under no illusion that we just don’t know when the next outbreak is going to be,” she said.