For starters, it can afford to take more time. Australia has recorded 50 days without community transmission this year, and no deaths.

It’s a stark contrast to the US and UK, where the pandemic continues to wreak havoc.

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The UK has recorded 4.3 million cases and more than 126,000 deaths. While cases are falling, it is still recording about 5000 cases a day. The US, which passed the grim milestone of half a million deaths in February, has a seven-day rolling average of about 53,000 cases.

Australia’s peak doctor associations say most people should be vaccinated by their regular doctor and the federal government agrees. Who better to vaccinate the elderly and those with underlying chronic health conditions than the doctor who knows them best?

In the next few weeks, more than 4500 GP clinics around the country will be part of the push to deliver millions of vaccines, and later in the year doctors’ groups hope most practices will be able to provide vaccinations for their own patients.

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But this method is not without problems. The logistics of getting thousands of doses to thousands of different vaccination centres around the country is complex. It has led to some of the delays in the aged care rollout, where so far about 58,000 aged care residents in 609 facilities have received at least one dose.

The states are able to take their own approach. In Victoria, Melbourne’s Exhibition centre has been turned into a hub capable of vaccinating up to 20,000 people a week. The focus there, however, is to vaccinate critical workers including police, fire crews and meat-processing staff. NSW is also looking at scaling up state-run facilities in the near future.

Australia’s vaccine rollout is in its infancy and international supply problems have caused unavoidable delays.