Australia to ramp up vaccination drive

Australia will ramp up its COVID-19 immunisation drive with more shots to be rolled out from next week, federal Health Minister Greg Hunt said on Tuesday, after a second shipment of the vaccine reached the country overnight. About 166,000 doses of the vaccine developed by Pfizer Inc and Germany's BioNtech arrived late Monday, authorities said, as the country entered the second day of a nationwide inoculation programme.

Total weekly doses will be raised to 80,000 next week from 60,000 doses this week, with the number expected to reach 1 million a week by the end of March when CSL Ltd begins to locally produce the AstraZeneca vaccine. Australia on Monday began mass COVID-19 vaccinations for its 25 million people after the arrival last week of a first batch of more than 142,000 doses of the Pfizer/BioNtech vaccine.

"The consistency of supply has been strong and heartening ... and that just gives Australians confidence in terms of the effectiveness of the vaccines and confidence in terms of the reliability of supply," Hunt told reporters in Canberra.

Border closures and speedy contact tracing have helped Australia keep its COVID-19 numbers relatively low, with an easing of restrictions putting the economy on a recovery track. The government has decided to raise the base rate of the unemployment allowance by A$25 ($19.78) a week from April 1, Australian media reported, as it looks to end a coronavirus job subsidy due to an improving labour market.

Australia has reported a total of just under 29,000 COVID-19 cases and 909 deaths since the pandemic began. The country's two most populous states of New South Wales and Victoria reported no new local cases on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, The first of three expert panels in South Korea reviewing a COVID-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer Inc and BioNTech gave its recommendation on Tuesday for the government to approve the vaccine. The national pharmaceutical panel is planning to make its recommendation on Friday, the same day that South Korea will begin its immunisation drive. But, the government will wait for a third panel, which has not said when it will reach its conclusion, before deciding whether to grant approval.

High-risk individuals, prioritised at the start of the vaccination campaign, will be inoculated with a vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University.

A day later, however, South Korea will make use of 117,000 doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine that have been supplied through COVAX, an international coronavirus vaccine sharing programme, bypassing the need for the government's final approval.

Around 55,000 healthcare workers in COVID-19 treatment facilities will receive the first doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine on Saturday. The first panel to report on the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine advised that it should be administered to people aged 16 and over, taking into account its global trial results and approval in several other countries.

Pfizer has promised to double its supply of the vaccine for the United States by the middle of March and also raised global production expectations for 2021 to at least 2 billion doses.