Marshall doesn’t buy into the blame game over vaccine rollout

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Prime Minister Steven Marshall has refused to blame the Federal Government’s vaccination program for South Australia’s current plight, saying there is no plausible scenario where we would not have had a lockdown now in as part of the planned deployment.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison addressing the media earlier this month. Photo: Mick Tsikas / AAP

However, Marshall admitted that the vaccination program had been compromised by the constraint on the availability of mRNA, as the Deputy Premier of New South Wales today pointed out the Commonwealth deployment for us. to have dropped.

New South Wales Deputy Premier John Barilaro told ABC News Breakfast this morning: Honestly, I think the vaccination rollout has let us down.

At 18 months of the pandemic, you do not wait for the end of the crisis to start vaccination, he said.

When you look around the world, vaccination has become part of managing COVID [whereas in Australia] we took over and then there was a delay in vaccinating.

He said current demand exceeded supply, saying: This is a real problem for the federal government which has promised more and hopefully by the end of the week that promise will materialize.

However, when asked today if the Commonwealth was guilty of the seven-day SA lockdown, Marshall dismissed the suggestion.

Deployed vaccination [program] as quickly as possible, with the constraint we have around mRNA vaccines from both Pfizer and Moderna, which is next to arrive, he said.

But there has never been a scenario where we would have sufficient amounts of vaccine at this time of year.

We were still talking much later in the year.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been politically haunted by his earlier claims that the vaccine rollout was not a race, a phrase he said on Adelaide Radio this morning had been militarized by political opponents.

I think it is unfortunate that the comments that both [Health boss Professor Brendan] Murphy and I did at the time being used as they were, he told ABC Radio Adelaide.

We were talking about how careful we need to be about approving vaccines for use in Australia [and] I don’t think anyone should have suggested that we should have cut corners on this.

But, look, I know how politics works and I know how people take things out of context about what you’re saying, and that’s what happened, and that’s unfortunate.

However, when asked if he accepts that the national immunization program has not been ideal, Morrison replied: Yes, we have had our problems, I openly confessed.

And some of those issues, a lot of them, are beyond our control, but the problem is you get over them and fix them, he said.

This is why we were now reaching dosage rates of a million per week, just below that and this is why we were now on the right track to ensure that by the end of the year, all of those who seek to be vaccinated would have had this opportunity.

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Morrison again blamed the delays on early supply issues and multiple updates to expert advice on the AstraZeneca jab, describing the ATAGI recommendations as a big deal.

But he said the deployment was intensifying significantly, with the addition of more supplies and vaccination centers.

He said it probably put us about two months behind where we hoped to be.

But we’ve pulled that number down quite significantly in recent months, and well over four million doses of vaccine have been delivered this month, he said.

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