Experts: Vaccine rollout deadline impossible at current rates

The government’s rollout plans have been stymied by untrained doctors, spoiled doses and communication failures with the states.

After a succession of false starts and missed dates, Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Health Minister Greg Hunt declared on February 21 that Australia’s Covid-19 vaccination rollout was off and running.

The pair talked in big, bold numbers. “Over the course of this week, we hope to see over 60,000 vaccinations, 240 different aged-care centres, 190 towns, and suburbs around the country from Alice Springs to Albany, to Altona Meadows and so many others,” Hunt told reporters.

Morrison said the government would see the “whole population” vaccinated in eight months.

“We said we’d get there by October,” he said. “We’re on track.”

And then things started to go wrong. Two days later, two residents of a Brisbane aged-care home, aged 88 and 94, were given four times the approved dose of the Pfizer vaccine by a doctor who had not been properly trained. The doctor was stood down and subsequently so was the chief executive of Healthcare Australia, the company that failed to ensure he was trained, after the government was initially misled about his training.

Days after that, another private company contracted to help with the rollout, Aspen Medical, advised the government that 25 vials of Pfizer vaccine – enough for about 120 doses – had to be thrown away on the suspicion they’d not been correctly refrigerated.

Such incidents may be dismissed as simple human error, but there are indications, too, of broader systemic problems.

On Monday this week, the New South Wales premier, Gladys Berejiklian, publicly complained that the federal government had failed to inform her government how many doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine – 300,000 had arrived in the country the previous day – the state would receive.

On Wednesday, she again complained about a lack of information about which agedcare facilities had received the vaccine from the Commonwealth. The state was also concerned that private contractors to the federal government were vaccinating only aged-care residents, not staff, as the state understood