Australia‘s acting chief medical officer said on Tuesday that more than 3 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine that should have arrived under its contracts have yet to come.
The poor implementation of the coronavirus vaccine program, according to Michael Kidd, is attributed in part to availability problems from overseas.
“We’ve had issues with vaccine supply from overseas – about 3 million doses of the overseas AstraZeneca vaccine that was supposed to arrive in Australia by now haven’t delivered,” Kidd told Channel Nine’s Today Show.
The European Union suspended the shipment of 250,000 AstraZeneca vaccines expected to depart Italy for Australia in early March, citing a new procedure that requires the bloc to suspend shipments if it thinks a producer has refused to satisfy its commitments to EU countries.
Since then, it has strengthened regulations ever further.
While Kidd did not specifically mention the EU, agriculture minister David Littleproud had claimed the day before that Australia was “3 million short by the EU.”
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The sluggish start to the country’s campaign has been blamed on supply chain problems, according to Health Minister Greg Hunt, who says locally produced AstraZeneca doses could step up the push.
According to the news service AAP, Australia has hoped to distribute 4 million vaccine doses by the end of March, but has only handed out almost 842,000 vaccine doses since the program began more than a month ago.
Since the pandemic started, the country of about 25 million people has seen 29,000 coronavirus cases and just over 900 Covid-19 deaths.
SOURCE: ATLFMONLINE
