KARL STEFANOVIC:
More than 800,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine have been approved for use, marking the single largest delivery of vaccines for Australians so far. Professor John Skerritt is from the Therapeutic Goods Administration and he joins us now from Canberra. Professor, thank you for your time again this morning. Always appreciate it.
JOHN SKERRITT:
Good morning.
KARL STEFANOVIC:
When will the first Australians receive these vaccines?
JOHN SKERRITT:
It may even be later today or tomorrow. The trucks are literally rolling them out now.
KARL STEFANOVIC:
Well, that is good news. How do you feel about the rollout and the speed of it?
JOHN SKERRITT:
Well, we are now in the position that we always said we would be. But having the Australian manufactured vaccine and having spent many months working on that was a master stroke. Had we been totally dependent on imported vaccines, obviously Australia is at the mercy of decisions made in Europe and other places. So having an onshore manufacture of these 50 million is absolutely fantastic.
KARL STEFANOVIC:
Just on that, I know, as you rightly point out, if we were reliant upon Europe, it would be an absolute mess for us here. Can we rely on CSL as our main source of vaccines or are we still going to need a top up from Europe?
JOHN SKERRITT:
Well as you know, Australia is also- apart from the European vaccines - and we have 20 million coming in from Pfizer as well as the overseas AstraZeneca - we have also arranged to purchase 51 million Novavax vaccines; they're a couple of months away. But there's no evidence that they will be held up in this global political challenge for countries are having with Europe at the moment. So, we have more than enough vaccine for all Australians coming.
KARL STEFANOVIC:
The government promised 4 million, Professor, vaccinations would be done by the end of March. So far, we've achieved barely about 7 per cent of that by our calculations. Will you up the ante from here?
JOHN SKERRITT:
Well, we will be able to up the ante because we have locally manufactured vaccines. So just yesterday, we approved 832,000 doses. That's much more than we already have onshore. So the pace will increase dramatically now.
KARL STEFANOVIC:
GPs have been critical of the rollout, they want more and they want it today. When will they get more?
JOHN SKERRITT:
Well, they'll start to get more and more. So there's 1,000 practices that are already signed up to be in the first phase of GPs. This will be increased slowly over the next three or four weeks to 4,000 practices. It would have been inappropriate to give 4,000 practices vaccine while we just didn't have the material to go around, but as I say, the amounts are now dramatically increasing. So as every week goes by, there'll be more and more GPs and closer to where people live to be able to have a vaccination. So that's a great thing.
KARL STEFANOVIC:
Professor, can you give us some insight into the approval from the TGA? It's my understanding that you have to approve every batch. Is that correct and what's the time line on that process?
JOHN SKERRITT:
So we do for every vaccine. It's not just COVID vaccines. We actually check every batch to check that it's made the same way as the previous batch, made the same way as batches used overseas, is the right concentration and has no quality problems. And so our laboratories - and we're lucky that we actually have in-house laboratories with 100 staff doing all sorts of different things - our laboratories actually test vaccine physically and we also look at all the documentation. Now, the testing can take up to a week, it just depends on the type of vaccine, and so we started testing these samples of vaccines a little while ago.
KARL STEFANOVIC:
All right. Appreciate your time today, Professor. Thank you so much.
Contact
