Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack says Australia's coronavirus vaccine rollout is competitive in comparison with other countries around the world.
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Mr McCormack, the federal Member for Riverina, received his first dose of the COVID-19 AstraZeneca vaccine on Monday morning at the Commonwealth-funded hub at Glenrock Country Practice in Wagga.
Speaking to reporters before getting his jab, Mr McCormack said he wanted Australians to get vaccinated against coronavirus as soon as possible but doubled down on earlier comments that the rollout is "not a race".
"I want [people] to be ... concerned enough to go and get the jab when they're eligible to do so. But there's no need to panic, there's no need to be alarmed," he said.
More than 5 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have now been administered in Australia after a rocky start to the federal government-led inoculation program.
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Wagga GP Ayman Shenouda, who heads the Glenrock clinic and administered Mr McCormack's vaccine, said rates of vaccination had picked up after the recent COVID-19 outbreak in Victoria.
"I think we are waiting for the Commonwealth to give us the green light to get the Pfizer injection. I think it's very important," he said.
"And it's very important for a hub like this to be able to vaccinate as many people, we want to vaccinate as many people as we can, in a shorter period of time."
Mr McCormack said he didn't know how many people in Australia had been fully vaccinated.
Some vaccines, including those manufactured by AstraZeneca and Pfizer, require two doses to provide the highest level of protection possible.
"We're getting 100,000 people vaccinated every day, and that's a good thing," Mr McCormack said.
Mr McCormack said Australia was a "very competitive player when it comes to anything anywhere around the world".
He was initially referring to international trade but then said Australia was "going very, very well" by "any measure", including the Morrison government's vaccine rollout.
"I wouldn't want to be in any other particular place in the world than regional Australia because it's the safest on the planet in which to live at the moment," Mr McCormack said.
The United Kingdom has fully vaccinated 41 per cent of its population, the United States 40 per cent and Australia just 2.2 per cent, according to figures compiled on June 4 by Oxford University's "Our World in Data" project.
Figures from the John Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Centre show similar rates of complete vaccination across the three countries.
However, Mr McCormack said Australia's rollout was competitive and also praised the government for committing to providing up to 6 million free vaccine doses for the Pacific and Timor-Leste.
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