Poor planning in the early COVID-19 vaccination rollout by the federal Department of Health meant it could not track vaccination rates among frontline healthcare and border workers.
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A new audit of the rollout has found it failed to meet any of the government's five targets for vaccinating priority groups, including vulnerable people in residential disability and aged care settings and indigenous Australians, despite those groups being eligible from Phase 1A and 1B of the rollout.
The department was eventually able to track vaccination status of residential care workers, but only after hundreds of people in residential care had died.
Professor Brendan Murphy, who helped steer Australia's response to COVID-19, first as chief medical officer and later as secretary of the Health department, responded to the audit saying the country's 90 per cent vaccination rate by the end of 2021 was "testament to the success of the program."
"The program has administered over 60 million doses in Australia and has established a logistics operation comprising of over 10,000 vaccination sites which are [sic] delivered up to 3 doses each week," he wrote in response to Auditor General Grant Hehir.
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Mr Hehir found the vaccination rollout improved as it continued. However, the department had failed to engage enough vaccine administration service providers and had underestimated the magnitude and complexity of the rollout to aged care and residential disability facilities.
The department attributed its slow rollout in those facilities to difficulty in scheduling visits, processes that required manual entry of data, and a limited workforce to administer the vaccinations.
There were a total of 918 deaths in aged care facilities across Australia by the end of 2021, the majority of deaths were in Victoria. Total deaths in aged care facilities have jumped to 3742 by August 16, 2022.
The changed advice on AstraZeneca in response to extremely rare deaths in the first half of 2021 meant the department had to change many of its rollout plans, especially in rural and remote areas as the Pfizer vaccine could not travel as easily.
The percentage of Australians who were classified by the department as likely to get vaccinated or who had already been vaccinated dropped from 73 per cent to 63 per cent following changes to the advice on AstraZeneca in response to extremely rare deaths. However, the department found that pro-vaccination sentiment increased back up to 93 per cent by December 2021.
Half of Australians do not recall seeing, hearing or reading vaccine campaign advertising materials in December 2021, with lower rates for culturally and linguistically diverse communities (21 per cent) and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (31 per cent).
The vaccination rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people was consistently lower than that of the non-Indigenous Australian population throughout the rollout. The department attributed the disparity to predominant use of AstraZeneca in regional and remote areas, religious-based hesitancy and misinformation targeted at Indigenous people, and a lack of urgency to get vaccinated as there had been no significant outbreaks in Indigenous communities until August 2021.
Health Minister Mark Butler said the report "has laid bare the multitude of failures" of the former Coalition government.
"It's clear the former prime minister was more interested in getting jobs for himself than getting jabs in arms," he said in a statement on Wednesday.
"For much of 2021, Australia had one of the slowest vaccine rollouts in the developed world.
"Australians languished in lockdowns, workers couldn't go to work and students couldn't go to school because the former government failed to do its job and roll out the vaccine."