Scott Morrison has hit back at criticism for the coronavirus vaccine rollout.
Several state leaders have made allusions or even outright digs at the Prime Minister for not providing enough of the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines.
Aussies have been begging to be jabbed as roughly 12 million people are now in some sort of lockdown due to a large outbreak across New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia.
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But it appears Mr Morrison doesn't think it's fair for the finger to be pointed at him.
Speaking on Adelaide's FIVEaa radio, he said he 'doesn't accept' responsibility for the slow vaccine rollout.
He told the hosts: "Right now, under no plan was there any plan that said we'd be at 65-70 per cent vaccination in this country. Under no plan.
"Australia was always going to be in the suppression phase this year."
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He also told reporters later on that there are many factors that have gone into the way the jabs have been delivered.
"We've had significant challenges with this program, as many countries have, but what matters is how you respond to them.
"What matters is how you fix the things that need to be fixed and get the program doing what it needs to be doing and hitting the vaccination rates it needs to hit to ensure that we can get to where we need to be, where we want to be."
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The Prime Minister famously kept repeating last year that vaccinating Australians wasn't a 'race', yet now we have a huge Covid-19 outbreak with a little more than 10 million doses issued.
While he tries to deflect blame for the rollout, the vaccine program has been given a dismal assessment.
Three academics have written an article for The Conversation and labelled Australia's vaccine rollout as 'one of the greatest public policy failures in history'.
Carolyn Holbrook, an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award Fellow at Deakin University, and Monash University politics and political sciences professors James Walton and Paul Strangio have collectively trashed our government's strategy.
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"In recent weeks, we have learned more about the flaws in the federal Coalition government's vaccination program," they wrote.
"There's the failure to procure sufficient vaccine and an accompanying over-reliance on the AstraZeneca vaccine. The complications with rolling out the latter have exposed the shortage of supply of the Pfizer vaccine.
"While other international leaders personally lobbied Pfizer executives for supplies, Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Health Minister Greg Hunt were inexplicably passive."
Featured Image Credit: PATopics: Australia