Australia Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Friday he backs a pub’s plan to offer free beers to anyone who had just received their coronavirus vaccination.
The conservative coalition leader spoke after Tom Streater from the Prince Alfred Hotel in Port Melbourne was told to stop offering free beers to inoculated individuals by Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA).
TGA rules prohibited alcohol, tobacco or registered medicines from being offered as rewards to those who have taken the coronavirus jab.
Morrison said the crackdown on free beers was “a bit heavy-handed” even though he understood why it may have prompted a reaction.
“Those rules are there for important reasons so drug companies can’t offer drugs and cigarettes to people to buy their prescription drugs so it’s a sensible rule. But in these circumstances, the national interest is to get vaccinated,” Morrison told local television show Sunrise on Friday.
“The PA down there in Melbourne. Good on you for getting in behind the national effort. We’ll get it sorted. Common sense will prevail. Cheers. Cheers to the PA.”
Morrison said Health Minister Greg Hunt had spoken to the TGA overnight about relaxing the rules around offering alcohol as a reward after hearing of the pub’s issue.
Streater told Sky News Australia it was “great of the PM to jump in and offer his support”.
He said the pub’s free beer offer was designed to help boost the number of people getting vaccinated in the local area and “if even one in 10 of them go and get it done that’s a good outcome.”
Australia has been relatively successful in containing coronavirus clusters throughout the pandemic, registering fewer than 31,000 cases and 910 deaths total, AP reports.
It has recorded just a single coronavirus death since October: an 80-year-old man who died in April after being infected overseas and diagnosed in hotel quarantine.
Only nine percent of Australian adults are fully vaccinated.
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