Australia has rolled up its sleeves and notched a significant milestone this weekend.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
More than five million COVID-19 vaccination injections have been completed.
But the vaccination rollout program continues to be a hot-button issue on the political scene.
"We have seen the vaccine program is accelerating," federal Health Minister Greg Hunt said.
"As supply becomes available, the public is stepping up and doing their part of the job."
The Minister also announced an additional 100,000 vaccines are being made available for Victoria, which remains in a 14-day lockdown due to end on Thursday.
Federal Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese continued to apply pressure on the government on the need for purpose-built quarantine facility.
"This needs to fixed now, not wait until after the next federal election which will occur perhaps as late as May of next year," Mr Albanese said.
"We can't afford to keep having these lockdowns."
Meanwhile, British PM Boris Johnson has urged his global counterparts to speed up the rollout and get the world vaccinated by 2023.
Setting the scene before the G7 gathering on June 11-13, Mr Johnson is calling on his counterparts to "rise to the greatest challenge of the post-war era" by "vaccinating the world by the end of next year", in a move he said would be the single greatest feat in medical history.
"I'm calling on my fellow G7 leaders to join us to end this terrible pandemic and pledge we will never allow the devastation wreaked by coronavirus to happen again," he said.
Across the Atlantic, the freshly Facebook-banned former US President Donald Trump has issued a new attack on his nation's leading infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci.
Trump called Fauci "not a great doctor but a great promoter" for his frequent television appearances.
"But he's been wrong on almost every issue," he said at a Republican party convention.
Trump's own handling of the pandemic, in which nearly 600,000 people in the US have died and he himself was infected, was a factor in his loss to Democratic President Joe Biden in the November 2020 election.
Did you know you can receive this daily digest by email? Sign up here
THE NEWS YOU NEED TO KNOW:
- Exciting times await newest nursing graduates
- Gone fishin': A look inside Tassie's dating scene
- Bathurst quadriplegic patient waits days for surgery on broken leg
- Farmers beefing up herds to meet demand
- Your car could be the next victim in the mice plague
- 'Cooked', a coming of age film set in Newcastle
- Sleeping woman pinned to bed as car crashes into home
- Firefighters issue winter warning as house fire risk increases