The first vials of the Oxford University-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine has landed in Australia.
This will double Australia’s number of vaccine doses.
An Emirates plane carried 300,000 doses of the vaccine landed at the Sydney Airport at about 9.30am on Sunday.
According to the ABC, the vaccine doses have been transported to a storage facility in Western Sydney.
Here, it will be kept under tight security.
This is the second vaccine to be approved for use in Australia.
This is also the vaccine that is to be administered to the majority of the Australian population.
Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt told The Age that the delivery was “another point of hope” and “another point of protection” in the global pandemic which has claimed more than 2.5 million lives worldwide.
He added there would be 200,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccines sent to the states on March 8.
On the arrival of the AstraZeneca vaccine, Prime Minister Scott Morrisson told media:
“This is the next step as we ramp up the vaccine rollout. The University of Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine will undergo the same rigorous TGA process to batch check the vaccine that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine underwent. We will now be able to scale up the vaccination rollout to our priority groups, including our most vulnerable Australians and to our frontline border and health workers.”
Till now, 30,000 Australians had been vaccinated against coronavirus including 8110 aged care, disability residents at 117 care facilities and frontline health and quarantine workers.