Peter Lewis is shocked that his phone is not ringing off the hook.
The founder of Suretest, a supplier of rapid antigen test (RAT) kits in Australia, Dr Lewis is sitting on a supply of about 75,000 kits in his warehouse in Melbourne’s inner suburb of Malvern.
He's aware pharmacies and retailers in many parts of Australia are either running out of or running low on RAT kits – particularly in Sydney and Melbourne. Yet no one’s calling him.
“In fact, we have staff calling people saying, ‘Hey, do you need to buy some?,” Dr Lewis told SBS News.
Dr Lewis is not alone. A number of major distributors in Australia have warehouses full of RAT kits.
“Earlier this week, we had around three million rapid antigen test kits in our warehouse in Sydney and we have been getting deliveries of approximately 100,000 every single day since,” Allison Rossiter, the managing director of Roche Diagnostics Australia, another major RAT supplier, told SBS News.
“There’s not a shortage in the country. There’s just a shortage on the shelves,” Ms Rossiter said.
According to Professor Trent Twomey, national president of the Pharmacy Guild of Australia, the shortages on the shelves are a result of the pharmacists and retailers being blindsided by the government.
“We need a bit of notice to get the stuff out of the warehouses and into the location [where they] are needed,” Professor Twomey told SBS News.
“We saw no forewarning about the decreasing of the interval from six months to five months for the booster dose. We weren’t given any notice, so we saw regional outages of the vaccine,” Professor Twomey said.
“To prevent outages – whether it’s vaccines, whether it’s testing kits, whether it’s the antiviral treatments – we need to be given notice of change in public policy.”
The Pharmacy Guild of Australia represents 75 per cent of the country’s 6,000 community pharmacists and, according to Professor Twomey, the lack of forewarning from government around policy changes leads to significant supply-chain issues.
“We will respond to whatever change of public policy there is, but you can’t expect a system in a country as geographically decentralised as the Commonwealth of Australia to be able to respond with a number of hours' notice,” he said.
“We can’t find out like everybody else at a press conference. We just need to be given a bit of notice.”
According to Dr Lewis, the government should also do more to make suppliers of RAT kits more accessible to retailers.
“The distributors like ourselves are not being readily accessed by pharmacies,” Dr Lewis said.
While the Therapeutic Goods Administration has approved 15 RAT kits for use in Australia, there is no easily accessible list of RAT distributors.
“So people who need to buy them don’t know how to buy them. It’s not easy. Communication is the problem,” he said.
SBS News has contacted the office of Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt for comment.
