Victoria records a week of no new locally acquired coronavirus cases
Victoria recorded no new locally acquired cases of coronavirus on Wednesday, marking a full week of no community transmission.
There were three new cases detected in hotel quarantine from more than 18,000 tests.
The cases come as the The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald published concerns held by the Australian and New Zealand Society for Immunology, who said the federal government should immediately pause the planned rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine because it may not be effective enough to generate herd immunity.
Phase three clinical trials of the vaccine, which is the centrepiece of Australia’s vaccination strategy, show it is only 62 per cent effective in preventing COVID-19 when given in the recommended dose.
Shadow Health Minister Chris Bowen has said the federal government did not enter into enough deals to obtain different kinds of vaccines, knowing that it is hard to judge their efficacy during the development stage.
Governments throughout the world rushed to enter into deals with pharmaceutical companies to purchase COVID-19 vaccines without knowing precisely how effective they would be when they were rolled out.
Mr Bowen said that best practice meant the government should have entered into “five or six” deals with pharmaceutical companies to ensure the vaccine that would eventually be purchased would be effective.
“It would be better if they had more deals,” Mr Bowen told ABC’s RN on Wednesday morning, “Australia has three [deals], best practice is five or six."
Mr Bowen said this risk - that Australia would invest in a vaccine that was not as effective as others - was foreseeable and could be addressed by investing more broadly.
"They should have been spreading the risk … it is difficult to compare efficacy during clinical trials," Mr Bowen said.
David Estcourt is a court and general news reporter at The Age.