For a year since Australia’s first coronavirus case was diagnosed, The Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced a vaccine against the Coronavirus had been approved for local use.
After over 28,000 cases already infected and 909 were died, plans are under way for the Australian adult population to be vaccinated against Coronavirus at hospitals, specialist hubs, GP clinics and chemists by the highest of October.
The first group, who are part of “Phase 1a”, is created from folks that are either at a much better risk of contracting COVID-19, or at a far better risk to become sick if they do: so, quarantine and border workers, frontline healthcare workers, and staff and residents at aged care and disability facilities.Details about who is also a “frontline healthcare worker” haven’t been made clear at a national level but NSW Health has said it’ll include all of its ambulance and patient staff, included the emergency department staff, critical care ward staff, coronavirus ward staff, coronavirus immunology clinic staff and coronavirus pathology lab staff, further because the healthcare workers at Sydney’s Special Health accommodation, which may be a component of the state’s hotel quarantine program.
This adds up to about 678,000 people across Australia, with about 80,000 doses each week being given before the rollout really ramps up.
Next is Phase 1b: all other healthcare workers, Aboriginal and sound Islander people over 55 and other Australians over 70 who don’t seem to be in aged care, younger people
with an underlying medical condition and emergency and some critical workers.That adds up to about another 6.1 million people.
Australia is progressing to have 4 million people – all of Phase 1a and quite half Phase 1b – vaccinated by the highest of April. Most Australians will have their vaccine in either Phase 2a (the remaining Aboriginal and strait Islander population, other Australians over 50 and other critical and high-risk workers) or Phase 2b
(everybody else aged 16 and over) using the AstraZeneca vaccine.
If the Therapeutic Goods Administration approves a vaccine to be utilized in children (more thereon later, too), Phase 3 of the rollout will see children under 16 vaccinated. The federal has invested $23.9 million during a communications campaign providing information about when and where people are receiving their dose. There are recent concerns about whether the vaccine rollout could even be further delayed after the EU placed export controls on both the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines being produced within its borders amid issues with supply timelines.
Health Minister Greg Hunt said AstraZeneca vaccine had experienced a “significant supply shock” abroad, which could affect Australia’s promised imports. On January 28, acting Chief medic Michael Kidd said international imports of the vaccine would now be arriving in early March, with locally produced AstraZeneca vaccines (again, more thereon below) expected to be ready by late March.
Which vaccine will you get? At this stage, Australia’s rollout plan is hinged on two vaccines: one by pharma Pfizer and biotechnology company BioNTech and also the opposite by researchers at the University of Oxford and company AstraZeneca.
“We have two vaccines, which are effective and safe enough, which can be an excellent distance from where we thought we’d be six months ago,” says Professor Julie Leask, an immunisation uptake researcher from the University of Sydney.
The first groups will receive the Pfizer vaccine, which the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) approved to be utilized in people aged 16 years and over after clinical trials indicated it’d prevent symptomatic COVID-19 in 95% of recipients.
The Pfizer vaccine comes in two doses, to lean 21 days apart.
Australian government has bought 10 million doses, which are being manufactured in Belgium.
The Pfizer vaccine is an mRNA vaccine, which suggests it works by giving the body the material that encodes the protein of the virus, rather than the protein itself. Essentially, it shows the body what the virus looks like without actually infecting it, so it can design its reaction.
Doses of the Pfizer vaccine need to be imported from Europe and stored during a “cold chain” facility at minus 70 degrees, which could be a component of why they’re doing not form the bulk of Australia’s vaccine strategy.
The TGA identified some side effects with the Pfizer vaccine: over 60 % of people will experience fatigue, quite half will get a headache, over 30 per cent will suffer muscle pain or chills and quite 20 per cent will experience joint pain.
But the most of Australian people should expect to receive the AstraZeneca vaccine, which federal Health Minister Greg Hunt has called the “ace within the hole” of Australia’s rollout.
The AstraZeneca vaccine may be a “non-replicating viral vector vaccine”: scientists have taken an outbreak that sometimes gives chimpanzees a chilly but is harmless to humans and genetically engineered it to appear as if SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, to trigger an reaction
It’ll have to be stored at 2 to eight degrees, like most vaccines.
Australia will have 53.8 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine: 3.8 million imported from overseas and 50 million manufactured by Melbourne-based biotechnology company CSL under an agreement. This vaccine has not yet been approved by the TGA, but will likely also require two doses.
Phase three trials indicate it’s an overall 70 per cent efficacy at preventing symptomatic COVID-19, which is about on par with the common efficacy of the annual influenza vaccine. Professor Leask says, although the AstraZeneca vaccine has slightly lower efficacy rates than Pfizer’s, its worth is in what proportion easier it’ll be to move and store.
“It’s not nearly whether the vaccine is kind of effective, it’s also about whether you’ll reasonably deliver the vaccine to a rustic with a large land base,” she says. It should even be noted that nobody who took part in clinical trials of the AstraZeneca vaccine developed severe coronavirus or died, leading health authorities to conclude it’s 100 per cent efficacy against severe cases of the virus.
While Australia has based its strategy on the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccinations, we even have two other vaccine agreements: one for 51 million doses of the Novavax vaccine, being made in several locations across Europe, and another 25.5 million doses of a combination of vaccines under the international COVAX distribution program, which aims to produce fair global access to vaccines once they’re made available.
Phase three trials for the Novavax vaccine are ongoing, but early data indicated it’s going to offer even greater protection against coronavirus by having a control on transmission still as symptomatic infection. If all of those agreements come through, Australia could have access to about 140 million vaccine doses.
Some vaccines hunting approvals processes overseas that Australia doesn’t have any agreements for – notably the Moderna vaccine, which is being unrolled within the UK.
Where will you be vaccinated, and by whom? As mentioned earlier, the Pfizer vaccine has to be kept at minus 70 degrees. For this reason, the primary vaccines are going to be administered at up to 50 hospital hubs with ultra-cold freezers in metropolitan and regional areas across Australia. The full list of locations for these hubs isn’t yet available, but some details are announced.
Melbourne: Austin Health, Western Health and Monash Health will run hubs out of major metropolitan hospitals.
NSW Health is planning for vaccination hubs located at RPA, Westmead and Liverpool hospitals, followed by Hornsby, St George, Nepean, Newcastle, Wollongong, Coffs Harbour, Dubbo and town hospitals.
In Queensland, medical examiners in Brisbane, the Gold and Sunshine coasts furthermore because the north Queensland cities of Cairns and Townsville are going to be vaccinated first.
State public health nurses will have a “big role” in administering the Pfizer vaccines in these hubs, says Australian Primary Health Care Nurses Association President Karen Booth.