FRAN KELLY:
With the corona crisis deepening, deepening in Sydney and the state border with Victoria now slammed shut overnight, there's renewed urgency to vaccinate as many people as quickly as possible.
Lieutenant General John Frewen is the military man in charge of the vaccine rollout. He joins us now. Lieutenant General Frewen, welcome to RN Breakfast.
JOHN FREWEN:
Hi, Fran. Good to be with you.
FRAN KELLY:
Southwest Sydney's ground zero now of this outbreak. How soon can you rush to the promised 300,000 extra Pfizer doses to the area? How quickly will they be in people's arms?
JOHN FREWEN:
Yeah. Look, all of those vaccines will be arriving there through this week and into early next week, Fran, and then they'll be bought, bought to bear as quickly as possible.
FRAN KELLY:
And just to be, to be clear, that- that's 300,000 extra Pfizer doses, is it? Or Pfizer and AstraZeneca?
JOHN FREWEN:
No. It's 150,000 Pfizer and 150,000 AstraZeneca. But that will, that will cover 75,000 people because that is first dose, second dose allocation.
FRAN KELLY:
First dose, second dose. Okay. Why do we need first dose, second dose right now? Most people it's- many people who'll be coming forward will be just on their first dose, won't they?
JOHN FREWEN:
Yeah. But that's- the way we make the allocations, Fran, allows for planning. So we provide the allocations and you get first dose and second dose accounted for. If we were to provide 300 doses right now, 300,000 doses right now for the first dose, then we would need to find another 300,000 second doses right now. That's, that's what we can manage right now, and that's what, what we're working with New South Wales to do.
FRAN KELLY:
And how quickly will we be able to manage more?
JOHN FREWEN:
Well, we'll monitor the situation. Of course, in an outbreak like this, testing, tracing, isolation are most important right now. We're looking to the most vulnerable cohorts as well - those very vulnerable cohorts, we're working with both across Sydney, but in the affected areas. But vaccination is an important sort of mainstay of keeping communities safe. But you get a less immediate effect from vaccination, of course, than you do from those other measures. So, we're working on all of those things together.
FRAN KELLY:
If more vaccines are being rushed to Sydney, and this part of Sydney in particular, is it inevitable that other parts of the country are missing out? And we heard the Opposition Leader, Anthony Albanese, on Insiders yesterday, say he was in Gladstone last week and the GP super clinic at Port Curtis had only eight vials of Pfizer. Is this, is this going to exacerbate some of those problems?
JOHN FREWEN:
No. This- These dosages that we're able to bring forward to New South Wales right now, we've made sure that that's not impacting the program more broadly at this stage. But, of course, we've got contingencies and we'll continue to work closely with New South Wales.
FRAN KELLY:
Sydney is bracing for more than 100 new cases today. The Premier says the few days afterwards will be worse, much worse. How swiftly are you trying to ramp up this vaccine rollout in southwest Sydney?
JOHN FREWEN:
We're working to accelerate the program across the nation wherever we can. But we've been engaged all weekend with the New South Wales authorities - we're in lock step with them and we're, we're providing them support in terms of the vaccine rollout, that they're calling for at the moment. And it's, you know, it's a concerning situation, but we're, we're doing everything we can at this stage, Fran.
FRAN KELLY:
We heard from Dr Jamal Rifi, who says right now community leaders are recording videos in language and in English to boost vaccine uptake. He says when the Sydney lockdown was first announced in the cluster in the eastern suburbs, people in southwest Sydney felt the virus was far away from the area and they behaved as if the lockdown was a light lockdown, which many- which it was really, and many people were calling it lockdown light, or mock down. Was the messaging wrong from the start? Did the state fail to lockdown hard enough? Or certainly, failed to communicate clearly that a lockdown is a lockdown, full stop?
JOHN FREWEN:
Yeah, look, that's a matter for the New South Wales authorities, Fran, my responsibility is to is to get the vaccines rolled out as quickly as we can. As I said, we're, we're working closely with New South Wales, but that, that sort of decision process is really to the New South Wales Government.
FRAN KELLY:
We've got these two new ads released to encourage people to get vaccinated. The first one, Arm Yourself, has been dismissed as- by some already as ineffective. The second one shows a young woman desperately struggling to breathe in a hospital bed - it's been blasted as insensitive. Bill Bowtell, the public health expert, says it should be immediately taken off air, given another young woman about the same age as the actor in the ad, quote: is on a ventilator fighting for her life. Do you believe it's too graphic? And why have- why chose fear to motivate people to get vaccinated?
JOHN FREWEN:
Yeah. Look, Fran, we've, we've been waiting to release the Arm Yourselves campaign to rally Australian's more broadly around the importance of protecting themselves and their families and communities - so we were pleased to be able to get that campaign rolling yesterday. Yes. The other ad is confronting. Yes, the situation in New South Wales, in Sydney, is very serious right now. So that ad has been used, we think, effectively right now to encourage people to get vaccinated as quickly as they can, because this is a very dangerous situation. The risks of contracting that are, are very severe. So that's the that's the intent of that.
FRAN KELLY:
So the intent of that ad is for young people under 40 in Sydney, in greater Sydney, their only option at the moment is to go to their GP and ask for AstraZeneca if they want that, even though that hasn't been the recommended health advice for them to prioritise that, that vaccine? So that's the message of that? Go get AstraZeneca? Because there's no Pfizer for the under 40s, is there?
JOHN FREWEN:
No. At this stage, we haven't opened up Pfizer to the under 40s. We've got a good increase in Pfizer now coming across the end of this month and into August. We were getting about 300,000 doses into the country in the early stages of this month. We're expecting now around a million doses a week, so that's a, that's a trebling, so that's going to help. Arm Yourself is out now, encouraging people to, to book into those vaccines as they become available. But for right now, for the under 40s, they've got a choice. And I think in southwest Sydney you've got to really weigh up the risks of getting COVID against the, the guidance, and they can make informed choice with their GP's. If the- AstraZeneca has been the mainstay of this programme so far, it's a safe and effective vaccine, people should make informed choices about it
FRAN KELLY:
And back to supplies. The New South Wales Chief Health Officer, Kerry Chant, is urging people to- who're in Sydney, in Greater Sydney, to get their second dose after six weeks - of AstraZeneca that is. If people heed that advice, could that spark a run on AstraZeneca? And is there a sufficient stockpile to meet what could be a real spike in demand?
JOHN FREWEN:
Yeah. Look the guidelines around AstraZeneca is that dosing can happen anywhere between four to 12 weeks. Again, it's a- it's an informed choice that people need to make [indistinct]…
FRAN KELLY:
Yeah. But we- most of us had expected 12 weeks. If most of us now take Kerry Chant's advice, do we have the supplies?
JOHN FREWEN:
Yeah. We have, we have adequate AstraZeneca. We're producing it domestically, and more than 10 million doses of AstraZeneca have been produced by CSL. We have the stocks of AstraZeneca available.
FRAN KELLY:
Okay. Very briefly, Lieutenant General - we've only got 20 seconds. Do you welcome the help of Kevin Rudd in securing the bring forward of the Pfizer supplies?
JOHN FREWEN:
Look, Fran, I've, I've heard the reporting. I can't really speak to that. But I know that the Government is working as hard as they can to, to get the supplies forward. All I will get those supplies into people's arms as quickly as I can, no matter where they come from.
FRAN KELLY:
Lieutenant General, thank you very much for joining us.
JOHN FREWEN:
Thanks, Fran.
FRAN KELLY:
Lieutenant General John Frewen.
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