In what can only be positive news for society and the travel industry in general, Australia will soon have access to up to one million doses of Pfizer vaccines per week, with supplies of the jab set to triple to help safely advance the country forward.
Australia currently has between 300,000 and 350,000 Pfizer vaccines doses a week to administer but that will jump to one million a week in the second half of July.
In August, Australia will receive 4.5 million doses of Pfizer vaccines, which is significantly more than first anticipated.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison says he is confident the extra Pfizer supplies will give the troubled vaccine rollout a shot in the arm.
And with another 1300 GPs joining the rollout to deliver the Pfizer doses, he believes the rollout can be completed by Christmas.
“We really are hitting the marks we need to hit,” Mr Morrison told ABC radio on Friday.
“We’ve done a lot of catch-ups, particularly over the month of June, and that’s seen us now hitting the levels we need to get this job done and have everyone offered a dose by the end of the year.”
Pfizer has promised Australia 40 million doses of the vaccine.
The vaccine shipments are being fast-tracked by several months but the total order will not increase.
Currently, just 10 per cent of Australians aged over 16 are fully vaccinated with two doses.
What a difference a week makes. It was only a week ago that Scott Morrison announced the government four-phase pathway out of the pandemic to a new normality.
Getting to the second phase of the pathway rests solely on achieving an assumed rate of between 70-80% of Australia’s population being offered a vaccine.
If today’s commitment toward that goal is anything to go by, all of us in the travel industry should feel some collective optimism that already, in just seven days, the journey out of this mess is now well underway.
This week we’ve also seen Flight Centre Travel Group, Qantas and Virgin Australia all make waves around an accelerated vaccine program.
At this rate, imagine what could be achieved by Christmas?
