David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is a really critical period in the history of our nation. We have been delivering. We have been delivering, delivering and delivering time and time again, and the vaccine rollout is reaching its targets. We all acknowledge there were hiccups and things got off the rails. The vaccines that we had signed contracts for were not delivered because of a higher authority rather than because of AstraZeneca. The company was willing to send it, but the EU blocked its export. We couldn't get any Pfizer from America because they weren't exporting any out of America. Their whole supply was predicated upon it being available for the US first. We got Moderna contracts in place. We got a Novovax contract in place. We have 28 million doses on order, and they will eventually be way more than is needed. We've placed forward orders for booster doses out to 2022-23. So there has been a strategy and it has been effective.

You can't expect 25 million people to be vaccinated in one go. There is just physically not enough logistics. But, from the way those on the other side carry on, one would think it's just hey presto. It isn't. Every arm of the vaccinations system has been ramped up pro rata to the availability of vaccines. We have 5,000 general practices and 3,600 community pharmacies now registered, and once these extra supplies come in I expect we will see that the figure will be higher than that record figure of 268,000 that I just mentioned. Now that we've got it rolling, I think the targets that have been set for December are accurate. There needs to be community willingness, which there is now, because we have suffered from our own success. We didn't see the high rates of death and the hospitals being flooded. Because we had been so successful, many people thought there wasn't much risk. But now they realise that vaccination is a critical part of the response.

We have also purchased drugs to treat people if they are sick. There is remdesivir and sotrovimab, a monoclonal antibody that blocks the delta version and other versions from attaching to the ACE receptor so that they don't get into the cells to make people really sick. On early treatment, many physicians around the country, in Melbourne, Sydney and elsewhere, are using off-label drugs to prevent severe progression of disease. So there are things that we have covered— (Time expired)

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