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

To add to the Prime Minister's answer and to address the question raised by the member, there are a series of priority populations, as I said. Firstly, let me reaffirm the point in relation to quarantine, which was the initial focus because that was the greatest source of potential ingress into Australia. Overwhelmingly, around Australia, the quarantine and border worker population has been vaccinated. That is our first line of defence. That is why—when you look around the world, with 580,000 cases a day on average over the last seven days—Australia has been overwhelmingly protected, with 94 days this year with zero cases of community transmission. It is the first ring of containment, the first priority. Secondly, what that does is it protects every element of the population in Australia. But, as well as that, the other frontline areas, of course, included those workers who are in our hospitals. It was overwhelmingly done for those in the frontline groups. Then, in terms of aged care, it has been done for 95 per cent of facilities around Australia. This is the highest vulnerability group on all of the medical advice. What we see, as I mentioned before, not just in the Whittlesea area—15 out of 15—but in the surrounding suburbs is that 66 out of 67 aged-care facilities have already received at least a first dose, with the remaining facility due in the coming days. In relation to disability, that is now where we begin to transfer the in-reach resources as we move to ensure that those who cannot visit a doctor are able to be provided with that support. The critical point about people with disability is that they have often missed out on vaccinations historically. So what we are doing is making sure that every person in disability care has the chance to be vaccinated, with— (Time expired)

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