SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australia on Monday approved the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for use, but warned that AstraZeneca’s international production problems mean the country would need to distribute a locally made injection 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 on Monday, noting that a year has passed since the first local coronavirus case was detected .
Vaccination of priority groups with the Pfizer vaccine is expected to begin at the end of February with 80,000 doses per week, Health Minister Greg Hunt told reporters.
Pfizer told the Australian government that it anticipated continuous supply, but would provide global production guidance “in mid-February to March and beyond, weekly,” he said.
The Australian launch update comes after AstraZeneca Plc told European Union officials on Friday that it would cut deliveries of its vaccine to the bloc by 60% in the first quarter due to production problems.
Hunt said AstraZeneca warned Australia that the company “had a significant supply shock and that means that we will not have as much of that international AstraZeneca in March as they had previously promised”.
The AstraZeneca vaccine has not yet been approved by Australia, which hopes to start domestic CSL delivery of the AstraZeneca vaccine in March, ahead of schedule, at 1 million doses per week, he said.
“The decision to pay a premium for a sovereign and safe vaccine manufacturing capacity on land through CSL puts Australia in a much safer position than almost any other country in the world,” said Hunt.
Australia has set a target of 4 million doses of vaccine by April. It also pledged to supply vaccines to Pacific Island countries on a later schedule.
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 personnel, frontline health professionals and elderly, disabled and resident care personnel will be the first group to receive vaccines.
There have been no new cases of community transmission in Australia in the past seven days, and there are no Australians with coronaviruses in hospital intensive care units. Hunt compared this to six million cases globally in the past 10 days and 125,000 lives lost.
“This comparison is almost unbelievable, the difference between where we are in Australia and abroad,” he said.
To ensure that it continued to be the case, Australia on Monday suddenly suspended its travel bubble with New Zealand for 72 hours and ordered all those who had arrived since January 14 to isolate themselves and be tested after New Zealand confirmed its first case of COVID-19 in the community in months.
“This will be done with great caution, while more is learned about the event and the case,” Hunt told reporters later in the day.
Australia had just under 28,800 cases last 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; Editing by Diane Craft and Sam Holmes