Coronavirus Australia live update: Covid vaccine rollout suffers major setback as under-50s told to avoid AstraZeneca

Vaccine rollout faces delays as authorities scramble to secure alternatives to AstraZeneca such as Pfizer for under-50s over blood clot fears. Follow updates live

11.24pm BST

Quickly there is some good news this morning! In fact great news!

If you have been following along you might remember the Guardian has been reporting on John Jobber, a terminally ill Tasmanian man who has been trapped for the last 14 months in Ireland unable to get home.

It’s been a rollercosters. I’m relieved and anxious.

My sister was frantically finalising all the paperwork, packing, doing PCR tests and getting him to his last dialysis when a text came through just saying the flight was cancelled “due to operational reasons”.

We couldn’t believe it. So she contacted [the families Qatar Airline representative] to ask why. He said “hold on I’ll get back to you”.

The baton has been handed to me to get him safely back to Tasmania via Victoria between dialysis sessions and then his ongoing care...

I’m looking forward to a huge hug with him.

Related: Victoria's coronavirus lockdown sabotages terminally ill Australian man's year-long fight to get home

11.16pm BST

A number of different countries have issues of different ages for AstraZeneca advisories. Paul Kelly has been asked why Australia settled on “50” as the cut-off:

I can understand that people are interested in how those decisions have been made.

It’s important that local context* is taken into account and that’s what’s happened and has presumably influenced other advice. We have been in very close contact with our European colleagues at the European medicines association, the ATAGI equivalent as well in Europe as well as in the UK, the regulator and their immunisation advisory group, they have used exactly the same data as we have been using because most of these extremely rare events have happened in Europe and in the UK and that’s where many millions of doses have been used of the AstraZeneca vaccine.