Five million extra booster shots will be made available to Australians over the next two weeks.
Health Minister Greg Hunt made the announcement at a press conference on Thursday morning, also revealing the country had now passed 2.25 million COVID-19 vaccine booster shots being delivered to providers, as per news.com.au.
Hunt urged any eligible people to come forward to receive their third shot. He added they expected to be 700,000 ahead of schedule by the new year.
“We’ll be expanding the vaccines that are being delivered in the first two weeks of January,” he explained. “Between now and the 15th of January, we’ll be delivering over five million vaccines, significantly increasing the numbers that are available.”
Hunt continued: “That five million will combine with those that are out in the field to make sure that approximately nine million are available between now and the middle of January. And that’s on top of the two-and-a-quarter million that have already been delivered. Please come forward if you haven’t had your booster yet and you are eligible, there is every opportunity to be boosted.”
He also revealed that there were far larger numbers of people receiving their booster shot than they had initially anticipated for this week. “There were 149,000 vaccinations yesterday across Australia coming off the Christmas long weekend and 112,500 of those approximately were boosters,” he said.
The extra booster shots comes after Hunt announced last week that the interval between the second and third dose was being reduced to four months, making more people eligible.
“These dates have been set out of an abundance of caution to give Australians early continued protection,” he said then. The changes were made following advice from ATAGI, the country’s expert immunisation panel. “The advice we have is that the protection as it is very strong against severe illness, but what we’ll see is a much stronger protection against transmission.”
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