Australia vows not to hurry vaccine rollout, citing UK 'problems'
05 January, 2021
Under installation pressure to speed up coronavirus vaccinations, Australian Primary Minister Scott Morrison on Tuesday said he'd not take "unnecessary hazards" and emulate Britain's crisis drug approval.
While vaccinations are already well underway in many countries, Australia's pharmaceutical authority is not expected to rule on prospect drugs for about another month, and is aiming to administer the first doses by the end of March.
Pressed about that apparently sluggish timetable, Morrison -- who early on in the pandemic boasted Australia will be "at the front end of the queue" for any vaccine -- recommended virus-ravaged countries like Britain had been forced to take chances with emergency approvals.
"Australia is not in an emergency situation just like the United Kingdom. So we need not cut corners. We need not take unnecessary risks," the conservative leader told local radio 3AW.
Australia had largely eliminated network transmission but happens to be battling to contain compact clusters of the condition found in the country's biggest towns, Sydney and Melbourne.
Around 26 people are currently in hospital nationwide with the condition.
He said Britain, with almost 60,000 situations of COVID-19 a good day was "found in the early phases" of the vaccine rollout and "they've had quite a few problems, and they're carrying it out on a crisis basis".
"They're not testing batches of vaccines before they're disseminated over the population, is my understanding," Morrison said, insisting Australia would perform such testing.
The Australian premier has for weeks said that mass-vaccination efforts in Britain, the United States and elsewhere would provide Australia with an increase of data about the safety of the vaccines than clinical trails could.
Australia -- with a human population of around 25 million -- has agreed to buy almost 54 million doses of the University of Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, with 3.8 million to be sent early this year.
In addition, it reached an agreement for 51 million doses of Novavax this year, 10 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine early this season, and had committed to a household University of Queensland vaccine that was scrapped while even now in trials.
Source: japantoday.com