Australia purchases Pfizer vaccines from Poland as COVID-19 infections spike

Australia has bought about 1 million doses of Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine from Poland to bolster its inoculation efforts in Sydney and its home state of New South Wales, as reported in Investing.com.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the extra vaccines would start arriving immediately and over half will be directed to 20- to 39-year-olds in New South Wales, which entered a snap lockdown on Saturday.

According to the news source, Morrison has been under pressure for a sluggish vaccine rollout, with only about 24% of Australians over 16 fully vaccinated as supplies from Pfizer, seen as the preferred inoculation for younger people, have remained in short stock.

Poland, which has fully vaccinated over a third of its population, said in a statement that the decision to offer vaccines to Australia was taken in light of the current outbreak of the Delta variant.