Gavin Pearce (Braddon, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Health. Will the minister please outline to the House how the Morrison government will help ensure access to COVID-19 vaccine for all Australians across urban, rural and remote areas?

Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Braddon—in particular, for his help at a time of critical need in north-west Tasmania last year when there was a significant outbreak. AUSMAT and the ADF were on the ground. He played an important role in providing public information, coordination and confidence to the community.

Australia has done very well by comparison with the great work and scenes of the pandemic around the world over the last year. In the last 24 hours, we have seen over 340,000 cases and almost 10,000 lives lost. By comparison, we are at zero cases of community transmission again nationwide today. At the same time, there are zero Australians in ICU with COVID-19. So our containment measures, whilst always being challenged, are strong and holding up. There will be days when there will be other cases. But, against that pandemic background, the critical thing now is to move to the next phase of ensuring that we roll out the vaccine. That vaccine begins on Monday. What that means is that we begin with the first of the 150 million vaccines that are available to Australians. We now have the Pfizer and AstraZeneca approvals and we begin with the rollout of the Pfizer vaccines as part of phase 1(a). That means that the first group of people across Australia to receive the vaccines will include the elderly, the aged-care and disability residents and our aged-care and disability carers. We will be taking the vaccine to them through our outreach workforce.

We are also supporting, through our hubs, the quarantine workers and the border protection workers as a priority identified by the states. In addition to that, we are providing outreach to ensure that through our hubs there will be support for our frontline health workers, who have played such a heroic role. This phase will take six weeks. The aged-care workers, for example, will be in rural and regional Australia, they will be in urban Australia; our aged-care residents in rural, regional and urban Australia. We will work through all of them, beginning, in every state and territory, in country and city areas.

As we move to phase 1(b), we will move to our over-80s and our over-70s and will have the immunocompromised and Indigenous Australians, Aboriginal and community controlled health organisations, general practices around the country, the support of pharmacies subsequently around the country and, in addition to that, vaccination clinics. All of these are about providing access to Australians everywhere.