Bendigo Health chairman Bob Cameron says the vaccine rollout program must be fixed

Despite improvements, in the past six months there's been an outbreak from hotel quarantine two to three times on average per month. Each time it's a matter of luck if the leak is a highly infectious person: an innocent super-spreader can cause a lot of damage. While our national borders stay open using this failed quarantine system (apart from the Howard Springs facility), we remain at risk of outbreaks, highlighting the importance of vaccination.

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The Bendigo Centre delivers the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines. However, due to limited supply, walk-ins for AstraZeneca was suspended this week, and priority given to private aged care and disability sectors.

Many people in those sectors had not been vaccinated by the federal government's contract vaccinators, despite assurances at the start of the rollout they would be the highest priority.

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The states established MVCs to help the lagging national roll-out. The fact they have become the primary outlets tells us the national roll-out needs a radical overhaul. Not next week, not in a fortnight, but right now.

Highlighting this urgency is Australia's roll-out being about the slowest in the western world, despite the PM promising we would be at the front of the queue. So the commitment last week that he would make ample supply of vaccines available in Victoria was indeed welcome.

Every year the flu vaccine is rolled out using GP practices and pharmacies. Yet, the national COVID roll-out - much larger - does not use pharmacies and only uses a small number of GPs with a small number of doses.

That's why many people can't get a GP vaccine appointment or have to wait many weeks for one.

Bendigo Health would like to see GPs getting the supply of AstraZeneca they need, and more of them. And we'd like to see pharmacies giving AstraZeneca from this week as well, as part of the Prime Minister's promise.

This would take pressure off our Bendigo Centre and allow us to concentrate more on providing the Pfizer vaccine, as it can only be handled by vaccination providers with considerable cold chain storage capacity.

By working together we can ramp up the roll-out. We just need the promise of supply and action to be reality.

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