SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australia on Monday approved the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for use, but warned that AstraZeneca’s international manufacturing problems mean the country would have to distribute a locally produced shot earlier than planned.
The country’s medical regulator was one of the first in the world to complete a comprehensive approval of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Monday, noting that it is a year since the first local coronavirus case was detected.
Vaccination of priority groups with the Pfizer vaccine is expected to begin at 80,000 doses per week by the end of February, Health Minister Greg Hunt told reporters.
Pfizer has told the Australian government it expects continuous supply but will provide global production pipeline “mid-February for March and thereafter weekly”, he said.
The Australian update comes after AstraZeneca Plc told European Union officials on Friday that delivery of its vaccine to the block would be reduced by 60% in the first quarter.
Hunt said AstraZeneca had advised Australia that the company “had a significant stock shock, which means we will not have as much of the AstraZeneca international in March as they previously promised”.
The AstraZeneca vaccine has yet to be approved by Australia, which expects CSL’s domestic supply of the AstraZeneca vaccine to start earlier than planned in March at 1 million doses per week, he said.
“The decision to pay a premium for a rural, safe, sovereign vaccine production capacity via CSL, which puts Australia in a much safer position than almost any other country in the world,” Hunt said.
Australia had set a target of 4 million doses of vaccinations by April. It also committed to delivering vaccines to the Pacific countries on a later roster.
The Pfizer vaccine has been provisionally approved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) for Australians aged 16 and over.
Australia will administer the two doses of the vaccine to each recipient at the recommended time.
Quarantine and border staff, frontline health workers, elderly care and disability staff and residents will be the first group to receive vaccinations.
For the past seven days, there have been no new cases of community transmission in Australia, nor are there any Australians with coronavirus in hospitals’ intensive care units. Hunt has faced six million cases worldwide in the last ten days and lost 125,000 lives.
“The comparison is almost unbelievable, the difference between where we are in Australia and overseas,” he said.
To ensure this remains the case, Australia on Monday abruptly suspended its travel bubble with New Zealand for 72 hours and ordered everyone who arrived since January 14 to be isolated and tested, after New Zealand’s its first case of COVID -19 in the community in months.
“This will be done out of an abundance of caution while learning more about the event and the case,” Hunt told reporters later that day.
Australia has had just under 28,800 cases in the past year, the overwhelming majority in the state of Victoria and 909 deaths.
Reporting by Kirsty Needham and Byron Kaye; Additional reporting by Sonali Paul in Melbourne; Edited by Diane Craft and Sam Holmes