The strange thing about the minister’s announcement was that it...

The strange thing about the minister’s announcement was that it infers Health will spend this money to bring IDT’s current facility to a state of sterile readiness. This has already happened and they received the money and got the license from TGA in September. This proves the minister doesn’t know everything that’s happening in his portfolio.

Also, he said “building its capability to undertake small-scale onshore vaccine manufacturing.”

In the announcement to the ASX on 23 August, IDT said “During the exclusivity period the Government in its discretion can nominate a COVID-19 vaccine - in which case IDT and the relevant vaccine company would need to agree on commercial terms for the manufacture of a specific COVID-19 vaccine.”

That didn’t mention “small-scale” and got many of us speculating that it could be either Moderna or Novavax.

On 13 October IDT announced a contract with MIPS to manufacture doses for their trial. They said they sought and received consent from Health to use the facilities during the exclusivity period, so the MIPS vaccine wasn’t nominated the the Government. I don’t think the MIPS vaccine was the reason that Health wanted the facilities brought to sterile readiness but it did benefit from them being available.

I’ve always believed from past announcements that IDT facilities were upgraded to fill and finish either Moderna or Novavax and I thought their capacity is similar to that of CSL so yesterday’s mention of small-scale vaccine manufacturing surprised me.