Richard Marles isn’t the one Labor frontbencher doing the media rounds this morning.
Well being Minister Mark Butler was on the ABC’s RN Breakfast earlier, explaining why it took some time for Australia to announce it had acquired monkeypox vaccines.
Minister for Well being and Aged Care Mark Butler. Credit score:Alex Ellinghausen
Simply over 20,000 monkeypox vaccines (from a complete of 450,000 secured doses) will arrive in Australia within the subsequent few days.
“These have been extremely troublesome to pay money for as you [can] think about,” Butler mentioned.
“Monkeypox has solely ever actually been endemic in international locations in Africa. And within the final 13 weeks we’ve seen it unfold to 76 different international locations, significantly in North America, and the UK and Europe. However we’ve got 58 circumstances right here in Australia as effectively.
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“So there’s been a burst of exercise by governments to get their arms on the latest third-generation vaccine, which is the one we’ve obtained maintain of. We’re now solely one in every of a really small checklist of nations that has provides coming to us in 2022.
“We’ve been speaking for weeks now with state governments about how they’d roll them out.”
The well being minister added that one other 100,000 or so doses will arrive in Australia over the “subsequent couple of months”.
