States set own goals, but rollout is Commonwealth led

Each state and territory have designated and will manage its own targets and priorities for the rollouts and the first batches will be delivered at one of 16 “Pfizer vaccination hubs”.

Each state and territory hopes to achieve the following:

• NSW will aim to vaccinate 35,100 frontline workers within the first three weeks
• The Victorian Government will have 12,000 doses for the first week of phase 1a and up to 59,000 doses for the first four weeks
• Queensland will have 100 doses for the Gold Coast today and will aim to vaccinate 27,000 key workers in the first month
• South Australia will aim to vaccinate 1,726 frontline workers at Adelaide Airport and the medi-hotel system this week and will have 12,000 for the next three weeks
• In Western Australia, about 5,000 doses will be administered by mid-March with about 1,100 of those reserved for aged and disability care
• In the ACT, about 4,000 doses have been flagged for the first week
• The Northern Territory will have 3,000 doses, most being offered to high-risk groups in the first phase
• The state territory not starting its rollout today is Tasmania.

Tasmania will begin its vaccination rollout on Tuesday and will have 2,340 doses ready for the first three weeks, which will double to 4,680 from the fourth week as phase 1b begins.

While distributions will be managed by the states, Victorian Health Minister Martin Foley noted this was ultimately “a Commonwealth-led program” and the rollout in states depends on “what we get and when”.

Professor McLaws said the end-goal of this rollout would be herd immunity — when enough of the population is vaccinated, the virus is effectively eradicated because it cannot spread.

/ Professor McLaws

She said it was difficult to identify the “magic number” needed to achieve herd immunity, but if three-out-of-five vaccines administered were AstraZeneca and the rest was Pfizer, then at least 75 per cent of the population needed to be jabbed.

This number may even go up to 90 per cent, depending on variant strains.