Australia news live: mass coronavirus vaccine hubs planned; PM does not apologise to former Australia Post CEO Christine Holgate

We have seen 60,000 people vaccinated yesterday. That is up from the previous day and particularly after the advice that we received from the technical advisory group on immunisations, regarding the remote risk that was associated with AstraZeneca, to see the numbers pick up the next day was an encouragement but we have a long way to go yet*.

I have called together the Premiers and Chief Ministers for us to work together to deal with the problems we have in the vaccination program which stem from two issues.

The first one was the constraint in the supply from overseas for our doses of those imported vaccines. We had three million that were supposed to turn up in those first few weeks and because of the problems in Europe, they did not arrive.

We were getting over the top of that problem and the second issue that has come from outside the Government’s control is the medical advice regarding those remote risks associated with AstraZeneca. That will change how we do the rollout. The critical thing right now is we must be vaccinating those most vulnerable in our community…

We will do everything we can to avoid an outbreak. But as we saw in Victoria, that cannot be always guaranteed. Those who we lost most, almost exclusively, were the elderly in Victoria when that outbreak occurred. Our goal right here, right now, is to ensure that we continue to progress forward with vaccinating that most vulnerable population.