Coronavirus Australia live update: Scott Morrison announces 20m more Pfizer vaccine doses after problems with AstraZeneca-led rollout

We discussed the recalibration of our vaccination program because of the advice from ATAGI today and that was a constructive discussion and already today states and territories are working with the commonwealth to that end. Our focus remains on the delivery of 1A and 1B cohorts for the vaccination rollout.

This is particularly important because we’re substantively talking here about people who are over the age of 50 and as Prof Murphy reminded us today that includes many health worker, many health workers that are in frontline roles whether working in aged care facilities or otherwise within the health system and particularly amongst the nursing community.

That is not to say there are not those under 50, of course there are, but we are talking about groups where we can continue to proceed with the vaccination roll out at the pace we are hoping to proceed at and to ensure that we meet the goals we have with those 1 A and 1B cohorts.

This is important because the goal here is to protect the most vulnerable in our community.

If we want to treat Covid-19 like the flu then we need to ensure that we’re vaccinating those in our community who are most vulnerable.

The most vulnerable people in our community are not just over 50, they are actually a lot older than that.

The AstraZeneca vaccine is well suited to address those critical vulnerable groups.

We reminded ourselves this morning that the key issue that we were concerned about a year ago as we feared the overwhelming of our public hospitals and all of these rather dire outcomes was because of the vulnerability of our most elderly Australians.

So vaccinating our elderly Australians remains a key priority that also supports the continued opening up of Australia because the risk factor of severe illness amongst the most vulnerable is therefore reduced.