Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Senior Australians and Aged Care Services) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Keneally for her question. Yes, and I did see the media conference where Minister Hazzard indicated that the spacing for Pfizer vaccines in New South Wales had been spaced out to eight weeks. I understand that in Victoria it is actually at a six-week interval. In other jurisdictions, they have varying intervals between the doses, based on the health advice.

We have continued to put additional capacity, where we can, into jurisdictions. In fact, only recently, we announced that we had available to Australia, through a deal with Poland, one million additional Pfizer doses, and we've put half of those into New South Wales, with the acknowledgement of the circumstances that New South Wales was seeing with the current outbreak, and today, very pleasingly, an additional half a million doses coming from Singapore will also assist with the circumstances nationally with the vaccine rollout. As the Prime Minister has said, we continue to work on the availability of vaccines to assist the vaccine rollout.

We've been very transparent with the Australian people. We have published the supply projections for vaccines out to the end of the year. That information was provided to the chamber some months ago. And we continue to be transparent.

There are significant supplies, right now, of AstraZeneca available. There are no constraints with respect to the supply of AstraZeneca. So I would encourage anyone who wants a vaccine to make inquiries about getting one.