To prevent any more Sydney hotspots becoming areas of concern, the NSW government will grant priority access to 16- to 34-year-olds who are based in some areas of the Eastern Suburbs. With numbers continuing to climb despite lockdown restrictions, achieving high levels of vaccination has become the state’s principal defensive strategy against the Delta variant. Sydney set another new daily record on Sunday, August 29, with 1,218 cases within 24 hours.
The entire LGA of Randwick – including the suburbs of Chifley, Clovelly, Coogee, Kensington, Kingsford, La Perouse-Phillip Bay, Little Bay, Malabar, Maroubra, Matraville, Randwick and South Coogee – will be fast-tracked, due to a rise in cases in the neighbouring LGA of Bayside, and concerns over an illegal party in Maroubra, which is emerging as a super-spreader event. Randwick Council is urging anyone living in the LGA who is eligible to book their jab at the Brighton-Le-Sands pop-up clinic at the Novotel Hotel on Princess Street.
Camden LGA, which shares a border with the hotspot LGA of Campbelltown, is also being granted priority access to Pfizer for 16- to 49-year-olds. However, limited supplies of Pfizer means those who book jabs might still have to wait a while to get an appointment. Currently, NSW is receiving 127,530 doses of Pfizer a week. This will continue until the beginning of October, when Australia is due to receive its next shipment of the vaccine, with 6 million doses replenishing national stockpiles.
To try to encourage more people to book their jab in the meantime, the federal government has pledged to launch a compensation scheme that will pay out to anyone who experiences the extremely rare but potentially serious side effects of the AstraZeneca vaccine, as well as any complications from the Pfizer vaccine. The no-fault scheme is intended to give employers the confidence to instigate their own voluntary or mandatory vaccination programs for their staff.
Blood clots and critically low platelet levels have been documented in people aged under 50 in about one in every million doses of AstraZeneca. Due to this small risk, the government’s advisory panel ATAGI issued a recommendation earlier this year that Pfizer be the preferred vaccine for younger Australians. However, this advice has led to a PR disaster for AstraZeneca, with many older Australians for whom the vaccine is considered safe rejecting it, choosing instead to wait for Pfizer, although currently all incoming Pfizer doses are being earmarked for people aged 12-49. Consequently, Australia lags significantly behind other developed nations for vaccine uptake amongst people aged over 60.