Australia has purchased about 1 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine from Poland to add to its inoculation efforts in Sydney and the state of New South Wales, which entered a snap lockdown on Saturday.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison yesterday said that the vaccines should start arriving immediately, with more than half to be directed to those aged 20 to 39 in New South Wales, as the state reported its second-largest increase in locally transmitted COVID-19 infections.
Morrison has been under pressure due to a sluggish vaccine rollout, with only about 24 percent of Australians aged 16 or older fully vaccinated, as supplies from Pfizer-BioNTech, seen as the preferred inoculation for younger people, have remained in short supply.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“We’ve been seeing those case numbers rise in Sydney and New South Wales each day and that is terribly concerning,” Morrison told a news conference in Canberra.
“We’ve got to get those numbers coming down,” Morrison added. “You needed more vaccines from us. More vaccines are on their way. They’ll be there this week, and so I need Sydneysiders to stay home so we can beat this thing.”
New South Wales, the most populous state, yesterday reported 415 new locally transmitted COVID-19 infections, the second-largest increase after the previous day’s record of 466.
Of the new doses, 530,000 are to be prioritized for express delivery over the coming week to 12 Sydney districts after their arrival in Australia yesterday night, Morrison said.
The remaining 470,340 doses are to be distributed to other states and territories based on their populations to speed up inoculations of the younger age group.
Concerned about growing infections in rural areas, as recent sewage tests detected the virus in several regional towns, officials on Saturday tightened restrictions and ordered a snap seven-day lockdown across the state.
With infections spiking, it is looking increasingly unlikely that Sydney is to come out of its nine-week lockdown on Aug. 28 as planned.
“Western New South Wales remains a concern, especially in relation to our vulnerable Aboriginal communities, and getting a vaccine to them is critical at this point in time,” New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian told reporters in Sydney.
Yesterday, officials said that four more people had died, raising the number of deaths in the state’s latest outbreak to 46.
Of the new positive cases, at least 66 are people who spent time in the community while infectious, Berejiklian said.
In the state of Victoria, 25 new locally transmitted COVID-19 infections were reported, up from 21 a day earlier, while Melbourne, the state capital, remained in the second week of an extended lockdown.
In Australia’s capital city, Canberra, which entered a one-week lockdown on Thursday last week, two new COVID-19 infections were reported.
Federal and state governments have committed to ending lockdowns when 70 percent of the country’s population of nearly 26 million people is vaccinated.
Poland, which has fully vaccinated more than one-third of its population of 38 million people, said in a statement that the decision to offer vaccines to Australia was taken in light of the outbreak of the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2.
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