Coronavirus: Amid vaccine shortage, Melbourne GPs forced to turn away vaccine seekers

Citing the mismatch between Australia’s supply of coronavirus vaccine and the explosion demand, Melbourne GPs say that they are being forced to turn away vaccine seeking citizens, including vulnerable residents from care facilities.

The latest outbreak in the country has created a public panic with droves of people looking to get vaccinated against COVID-19. In the state of Victoria, where earlier only 2,300 doses were administered on 24 May, merely ten days later daily recorded vaccination numbers are up to 20,000 in primary care.

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This sudden rise in demand has overwhelmed local GPs, who say that their vaccine supplies are evaporating almost immediately. Some clinics claim that they have made urgent requests for higher vaccine dose allocations to the federal government, only to be rejected.

Brunswick based Inner North Medical Clinic, currently has a meagre allocation of 300 doses per fortnight, which owing to the current demand, is exhausted in a single day. This has resulted in the clinic turning away thousands of residents seeking inoculation ever since the latest outbreak started.

“Our books are overflowing with people trying to get the vaccine that we don’t have doses for. The vaccine supply is still a really critical problem for us,”, said Dr Shea Wilcox of The Inner North Medical Clinic.

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Talking to the Guardian, Wilcox said that the vaccine undersupplies situation was so severe that the clinic was forced to turn away two local supported living facilities, one of which caters to residents suffering from mental health issues.

“We’ve had to say ‘sorry, we can’t do that’,” he said.

Local GPs say that the commonwealth’s system was not agile enough to respond to the kind of demand surge seen in Melbourne.

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While requests for doses allocation increases take more than a fortnight to process, appointment slots fill up within fifteen minutes of opening. Due to the COVID-19 vaccination funding model followed there, billing is done through individual GPs rather than the clinic itself, which means that the doctors or GPs must be present for all vaccinations, rather than simply using nurses. This has further led to a shortage of available vaccine appointments thereby restricting the ability to administer vaccines at large volumes.

The health department says that on May 26, it had released an additional 130,000 vaccines to supportVictoria.

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“To date, 787,780 Covid vaccines have been delivered to the Victorian state government with 513,375 vaccines administered through Victorian government vaccine clinics. 958,540 vaccines have been delivered to primary care sites in Victoria with 624,875 vaccines administered through primary care sites in Victoria,” a department spokeswoman said.

“A further 71,370 Pfizer and 101,100 AstraZeneca vaccines will be delivered to the Victorian state government this week and approximately 92,000 AstraZeneca vaccines will be delivered to primary care sites in Victoria by the end of the week.”