By Matthew Reddin
With the government choosing to shelve the AstraZeneca vaccine, it’s time they tell us how much this failure cost the taxpayer.
The federal government has now decided to shelve the AstraZeneca (AZ) vaccine. It was announced last week that the vaccine will be restricted to those over 60 because of how it had links to an extremely rare blood clotting condition.
Thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS) is a rare syndrome which has been reported after being given the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. It involves blood clots (occurring in body sites like the brain or abdomen) together with low platelet levels. The clotting may occur in around four to six people in every million after being vaccinated.
The Guardian is reporting the government has announced plans to shelve the supposedly controversial vaccine by October, suggesting it will have enough supplies of other vaccines to meet ‘allocation horizons’ for vaccinating the population by year’s end.
It also seems to have enough supply of biz-speak weasel words like ‘allocation horizons’; we’ll soldier on.
To this day (Thursday 24 June), the Health Department website continues to bloviate on the A-Z’s bonafides:
“50 million doses will be manufactured in Australia by multinational biopharmaceutical company CSL, in partnership with the developer, international pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca. Distribution of these Australian-made CSL doses has commenced and will continue on an ongoing basis.”
Per the website, in July and August, AstraZeneca will continue to be administered, with up to 2.6m doses being doled out each week, mostly to those over 60, through state and territory clinics and the primary care network.
Show me the money
Canberra is being extremely tight-lipped about the detail of the A-Z contract, admitting the amount of doses it ordered, but not their cost. There’s nothing on the AusTender site, and there’s very little that’s been reported in the press about how much it all cost. The federal government is refusing to say how much it is paying the four companies it contracted to help distribute the COVID-19 vaccine, saying the information is “commercial in confidence.”
BioPharma-Reporter.com initially covered the deal last September, noting the Australian government had made a $A1.7 billion supply and production agreement for Astra Zeneca COVID-19 vaccines, with the first doses set to arrive in January 2021. At the time, the reporting was that 33.8 million doses were coming from AZ, an additional 30 million doses being manufactured by CSL, and 51 million doses to be secured from the now-abandoned University of Queensland operation.
Per the government’s own vaccine info on the Department of Health’s website:
“Australia has entered into 5 separate agreements to secure more than 195 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines if they prove to be safe and effective.” [The ‘if’ in that sentence doing a lot of the heavy lifting there].
The Australian Government has invested over $5 billion in these agreements (Pfizer, Moderna, University of Oxford/AstraZeneca, Novavax, and the Covax Facility). This will, according to the Health site, “strengthen Australia’s position to have safe and effective vaccines as they become available.”
Somewhere in there among the $5 billion is the $350 million invested:
“… to support vaccine research and development. The investment will contribute to the global effort to find successful vaccines and treatments to stop the spread of COVID-19.”
Safety first
According to the University of Melbourne:
“Nearly all the world’s immunologists, virologists, medical professionals, and public health experts agree that COVID-19 vaccines, including AstraZeneca, have minimal risk to recommended subgroups and significant benefit.”
But enough cases of TTS, with a few fatalities, is not a good look for a government already pedalling fast to control the story. Pfizer is clearly the vaccine to have, but its available numbers are nowhere near meeting the demand.
Dr Norman Swan claimed on ABC Radio that Australia was offered the same preferential Pfizer vaccine access that Israel has enjoyed since late 2020, but the government took a different route.
“I’ve now had three sources telling me the same story, including from the United States, of what happened with Pfizer last June,” Swan told ABC Radio Melbourne’s Raf Epstein.
From what we can gather, the option was presented to the government to have enough Pfizer doses to vaccinate the entire (willing) population, but they seem to have gone all-in on the AZ instead – for whatever reason. Now that the AZ has been presenting with infinitesimally small, yet tangible enough statistics to take the sheen off the brand, they’re trying to quietly put the AZ in the too-hard basket and double-down on Pfizer, whose popularity vastly outweighs its availability.
Meanwhile, 177 million doses being administered in the US (53.9% of the population), and 5.5 million doses in Israel (60% of the population).
All up, 10.1% of the global population have been vaccinated. 6.72 million vaccine doses have been administered in Australia, with 1.09 million Australians fully vaccinated against COVID, constituting 4.3% of the population.
As NSW teeters on the precipice of another lockdown, feel free to insert one’s own ‘gold standard’ reference here.
This article was originally published on The Big Smoke.
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