PREVENTION: Australia announced on Tuesday that it had secured the “promising” coronavirus vaccine hat the pharmaceutical group AstraZeneca is developing with the University of Oxford
Australia should make the vaccination of its population against the coronavirus “compulsory”, except for medical exemption, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Wednesday.
The Conservative leader announced on Tuesday that his country had made sure to obtain the “promising” vaccine that the Swedish-British pharmaceutical group AstraZeneca is developing with the University of Oxford (UK) , explaining that Australia would manufacture and distribute it free of charge to its people.
Too high stakes
“There are always exemptions from vaccination, for medical reasons, but this should be the only one,” Scott Morrison told 3AW radio in Melbourne. Anticipating criticism from anti-vaccine movements, he said the stakes were too high to allow the disease to continue to spread freely.
“We are talking about a pandemic which has destroyed the world economy and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world,” he said, while specifying that the government had so far taken no action. the decision on vaccination.
That 95% of the population is immune
The Australian government estimates that 95% of the population should be immunized for the eradication of the virus. “We need to provide the broadest response to get Australia back to normal,” said Scott Morrison.
Vaccination against various diseases such as polio or tetanus is already compulsory before entering school in Australia. But the debate rages on, with some seeing the imperative as a denial of personal freedoms, and anti-vaccine groups online are teeming with conspiracy theories and accusations of misinformation about the risks.
The Oxford vaccine is one of five phase 3 vaccines
The Oxford vaccine is one of five vaccines currently in phase 3 trials. The researchers hope to have results by the end of the year.
Australia has yet to sign a final agreement with AstraZeneca on the price of the vaccine, however, and no local manufacturer has been named yet. No vaccine for the coronavirus currently in development has proven effective in clinical trials yet. But at least 5.7 billion doses have already been pre-ordered across the world.
The epidemic has soared in the state of Victoria
Australia was considered one of the countries that had best managed to control the epidemic before it soared into the state of Victoria.
Authorities have ordered a nighttime curfew and the closure of non-essential businesses until at least September 13 in Melbourne, the country’s second city, the most restrictive measures taken since the start of the epidemic. The total number of cases in Australia since the start of the pandemic is 24,000, and the number of deaths at 438, for a population of 25 million.
