The federal government says it has secured an additional one million doses of Pfizer's mRNA COVID-19 vaccine from Poland.
The government's boast of using Australia's global diplomatic network to search for additional doses only reflects its failure to support and secure vaccines in the early period of the pandemic.
It might be better late than never and we can always be thankful for the delivery of doses.
Yet it is undeniably embarrassing for one of the wealthiest countries in the world to be taking these doses ahead of developing nations that are still struggling to vaccinate their frontline health workers and other vulnerable populations.
A report in The Boston Globe yesterday revealed the dire situation in Africa. Uganda is struggling to manage a serious outbreak of the 'delta' variant and has just 285,000 doses of AstraZeneca's vaccine that were donated by Norway.
To put that in contest, Uganda has five million people currently eligible for the vaccine, including front line health workers.
Less than two per cent of Africa's 1.3 billion population are fully vaccinated. The Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has predicted it will take until the end of next year to vaccinate 60 per cent of its population.
Australians currently living in lockdown might welcome the one million doses of the Pfizer vaccine from Poland but there is no denying the embarrassment of pushing aside the needs of vulnerable populations in developing countries because of the failures of 2020.
Frankly, the millions of Australians currently living in lockdown might have preferred a similar level of urgency in the early period of the pandemic during which the government and its officials, in particular, arrogantly dismissed the need to ensure Australia quickly joined the queue for doses of the investigative vaccine candidates.
It could have followed the lead of other countries in quickly providing significant support for the development of vaccines and a dramatic expansion in manufacturing capacity.
Unfortunately, what we saw was arrogant obfuscation that reflected the 'business as usual' approach to funding new health technologies. The impact of this penny-pinching mindset is usually limited to specific and often small patient populations without a significant voice in decision-making. The failure on the vaccine has exposed this mindset because it has impacted every Australian.
There needs to be some accountability for this public policy failure and that is before you get to the hubris of some officials in their evidence to parliamentary committees. It would be fair to say some of the claims made about their vaccine procurement strategy have not stood the test of time.
More importantly, there needs to be consideration of how this mindset that has minimal regard for actual patients is impacting decision-making more broadly in Australia's health system.
The inevitable Royal Commission, or Royal Commissions, will eventually get to the bottom of this failure that now has Australia's diplomats 'lobbying' other countries for their excess doses.
Poland has fully vaccinated almost half of its population. Australia has fully vaccinated around 20 per cent of its population. That says it all.
Poland is one of the 27 member states of the European Union (EU). The EU announced advance purchase agreements for over 1.1 billion doses of four investigative candidates before Australia formalised its first agreement for AstraZeneca's vaccine under which it is produced by CSL in Melbourne.
As revealed by the updated analysis published in BioPharmaDispatch today, Australia's national immunisation program now lags comparable countries as well as at least one that would not be considered comparable.
In the space of 75 days, Malaysia went from administering the first dose to half of what Australia had achieved to being well ahead.
Australia's program was launched around two months after those in the UK, US, Israel, the European Union and Canada, so it was always destined to be behind.
Yet it was also launched with just 80,000 doses of Pfizer's vaccine, COMIRNATY, and significant medium-term supply constraints that were completely obvious to anyone and everyone.
The challenges were inevitable and predictable. The government denied the existence of this supply constraint until that claim became untenable given the day-to-day experience of prople just trying to make appointments to be vaccinated.
The government that initially denied the rollout was a race has now deployed Australia's network of diplomats in a global race for spare doses. This embarassing and shameful situation was entirely avoidable.
