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Thursday, December 12, 2024

Vaccine timeline brought forward

Federal Health Minister, Greg Hunt has today announced that the rollout of a coronavirus vaccine will be brought forward to early March.

The original timetable for the arrival of the vaccine in Australia was late March.

“In the same way that [medical] advice has allowed us to bring forward the time from the first half of the year to late March, and now early March, we will be guided by the medical advice,” Minister Hunt told The Daily Telegraph.

Pending approval by the Therapeutic Goods Administration, Mr Hunt said the vaccines from Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech would be rolled out first, with priority given to frontline health workers, hotel quarantine and border management staff, closely followed by aged care residents.

In the Daily Telegraph interview, Mr Hunt said up to 80,000 doses a week would begin arriving in Australia from later this month.

He said the next major vaccine candidate – developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University – was expected to be available for use in Australia by the end of March.

Both vaccines are already being distributed in the UK, where innoculations have been carried out since early December using the Pfizer vaccine.

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