2m doses of Pfizer vaccine a week by October

Minister of Health Greg Hunt has said everyone should be vaccinated as soon as possible after suggesting there would be ‘enough mRNA vaccines for every Australian’. 

Greg Hunt has said Australia should have supply of 2m doses of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine each week from the start of October, lifting hopes that all who want to get the jab could do so by Christmas.

With 3.5m vaccinations – of both Pfizer and AstraZeneca – administered as of 23 May, the government has been under increasing pressure over the pace of the rollout, amid a shortage of vaccines and concerns about vaccine hesitancy among some people.

In an interview with Nine Newspapers published on Sunday, the health minister said the government expected 4.5m Pfizer doses to arrive by the end of June. This would increase to 7m in the third and fourth quarters of the year.

Nine quoted Hunt as saying the Pfizer vaccines would arrive at consistent levels, which meant “an available pool of 2m doses [a week] for 13 weeks in the final quarter of 2021”.

Lottery tickets or cash: experts say Australians need incentives to get Covid vaccine

However, Nine said Hunt had cautioned that the timeline was subject to this consistent supply. 

The health minister was criticised this week after he suggested the increasing supply meant there would be “enough mRNA vaccines for every Australian”, prompting him to later backtrack and insist people should get the jab as quickly as possible.

It followed the government’s decision to recommend the Pfizer jab over AstraZeneca for people under 50, due to very rare instances of blood clotting linked to the later.

Overall, the government has said it has secured 40m Pfizer doses, including the extra 20m announced last month.

Until now, the government has been tightlipped about how many Pfizer doses Australia would get each week. With vaccine supply currently dominated by AstraZeneca, Guardian Australia reported this week that more than 1.5m Covid-19 doses were sitting in clinics across the country. A nurse at a clinic in Victoria claimed that she had administered only one jab throughout an entire eight-hour shift.

At the same time, some millennials, who are not currently included in the rollout, have been attending vaccine hubs to get the AstraZeneca vaccine, due to lower than expected demand among over 50s. These vaccines would otherwise have been spoiled.

On Sunday, public health and advertising experts told Guardian Australia the government should consider offering lottery tickets and cash as incentives.

Stephen Duckett, the health program director at the Grattan Institute, told ABC News Breakfast on Sunday the government needed to get the “vaccine program back on track”.