Question Time

COVID-19 Vaccination Clinics

The Hon. D.J. SPEIRS (Black—Leader of the Opposition) (14:05): My question is to the Premier. Will the government reactivate vaccination hubs to ensure that South Australians have rapid, safe access to the fourth COVID-19 vaccination dose? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

The Hon. D.J. SPEIRS: The fourth COVID vaccine is now available to people in response to the expected spike of COVID-19 cases.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:05): I thank the Leader of the Opposition for this important question. I believe that about two hours ago there was an announcement from the federal health minister to increase eligibility in relation to fourth dose vaccines for people under the age of 65, which we absolutely welcome. It is something that we were certainly encouraging would take place to deal with what we were seeing in terms of an increasing rate of COVID in South Australia, particularly in relation to the new variants of BA.4 and BA.5.

We are also in a situation where many people have had their third dose over six months ago now, so clearly there is an issue of waning immunity that is taking place. I am very pleased that a significant number of South Australians who are eligible for the fourth dose have come forward. The statistics that were presented to health ministers around the country on Friday when we met in Canberra actually showed that South Australia was the second highest state or territory in the country for people over the age of 65 coming forward for their fourth dose, which is certainly fantastic and great to see.

Now we see an eligibility increase, which has just been announced a few hours ago and which is now recommended for people over the age of 50 to get access to their fourth dose, and it will also be available for people over the age of 30. It will be people such as me, or the Premier, or the Leader of the Opposition who will be in that category and hopefully will come forward and say, 'We will be interested in getting our vaccine,' and certainly I will be keen to do that.

There will be other people, like the Minister for Transport and Infrastructure, who will be in that category and who will be absolutely recommended to get that vaccine. I am sure that he will do that at his first availability. We need to make sure that we are doing everything between now and Monday, when this becomes available, to make sure that we are geared up to have that availability.

We have obviously been in a stage where the number of people coming forward to our vaccination hubs have been quite minimal, and we have been in a position where it didn't make sense to continue to have a whole lot of health staff who could have otherwise been deployed in our health system—which is obviously under significant pressure at the moment—not there providing services because the number of people was so low.

We are now doing a very rapid piece of work to make sure that we have the capability, but I do stress that there is a huge amount of capability outside the Health SA networks, which wasn't the case in the early phases of the vaccination programs. There are over 600 different avenues, through GPs and pharmacies, where people can get access to vaccination at the moment. We know that there is a plentiful supply of the vaccine, and obviously we need to work with our GPs, pharmacies and health clinics through SA Health to make sure that they are available.

Even despite the changes that we made recently in terms of our vaccination rollout program, we still made it clear that there was going to be availability of SA Health clinics into the future as well. For instance, with respect to the Noarlunga mass vaccination site a deal was able to be struck in terms of a lease of that site, so that was remaining within the network in any case. There is a central clinic that's available on King William Street in North Adelaide. There is also going to be a clinic in the northern suburbs. There are also mobile clinics that visit across suburbs and regions, and there is also a network of regional clinics that will remain open as well.

But now, with this increased demand that we are going to be seeing, we need to make sure that there will be the availability, so we need to make sure we are doing that rapid work over the next couple of days to ensure that the vaccine is as available as possible because we want as many people as possible who are eligible to come forward to protect themselves, to protect their community and ultimately make sure that we can reduce as much as possible the incidence of COVID-19 in South Australia.