The Tax Office has flagged it could provide staff with COVID-19 vaccinations once they were available, as it looks for a company to deliver its flu shot program from next year.
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Documents lodged on Austender show the Australian Taxation Office is seeking a contractor to provide its employee influenza vaccination program between 2021 and 2023.
However, the ATO has told potential suppliers that if a COVID-19 vaccine became available during this time, they should have capability to carry out an onsite vaccination program for the coronavirus.
The major Commonwealth employer's approach to the market may foreshadow the public service's broader approach to immunising staff against COVID-19 if a vaccine is discovered and becomes widely available.
An ATO spokesperson said the contract would replace its standard flu vaccination program, and health and safety of staff was the agency's highest priority.
"As is common practice for multi-year contracts we seek to build in flexibility," the spokesperson said.
"If a COVID-19 vaccine becomes available, this contract will provide the flexibility for us to consider incorporating it into our standard voluntary flu vaccination program."
University of Queensland associate professor of medicine Paul Griffin, who is involved in the university's promising vaccine trial, said it was likely premature for departments and agencies to consider COVID-19 vaccine providers.
While Dr Griffin said it was "ambitious and noble" for the agency to want to protect its employees, it was far too early for any company to accurately state they could administer a COVID-19 vaccine.
"To have [a vaccine] generally available that a vaccinating company can get from a supplier, like we do at the moment with the flu vaccine, that is a long way away," Dr Griffin said.
"That's probably two to three years away I suspect."
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Dr Griffin, who is also director of infectious diseases at Mater Hospital in Brisbane, said it was still unclear how a vaccine would be administered. It would likely be an injection in the arm, he said, but an intranasal and oral vaccine had also shown promise.
Reports, both from Australia and internationally, have suggested vaccine development was progressing positively and a recent Oxford University study determined its vaccine safe for human use.
Dr Griffin remained confident of a safe and useable vaccine being found within one year.
"We'll have a vaccine in some form or even a few that are at least moderately effective by early next year," he said.
"What that really means though is that vaccine will probably be given in a prioritised way. So we might use that to address certain outbreaks, like in Victoria, maybe in vulnerable populations, health care workers, that sort of thing."
The Austender documents show that of the Tax Office's roughly 22,000 eligible employees nationally, it expected about 50 per cent to opt in to receive the flu shot over the course of the contract.
Tax Office data shows an increase each year in the number of staff receiving flu vaccinations, with almost 10,500 employees having the flu shot in 2019, up from almost 8500 in 2016.
About 1200 Canberra-based staff received the flu shot last year.
The ATO spokesperson did not comment on whether the agency would look at making any potential COVID-19 vaccine mandatory for workers.
Dr Griffin said once a vaccine is available, making it mandatory could actually have a counterproductive effect on its effectiveness.
"Making [a vaccine] mandatory often makes people more skeptical in some ways," he said.
"It might actually compromise our roll out of this vaccine."
A vaccine's effectiveness would be almost solely reliant on how much of the population elects to get vaccinated, he said.
"It is going to be the single biggest public health intervention this vaccine, and really will be what gets us back to normal," he said.
