Australia's first drive-through COVID-19 vaccination clinic

Instead of building supplies and sausage sizzles, the warehouse at 149 Barries Road in Melton, in Melbourne's outer north-west, is now home to Australia's first drive-through coronavirus vaccination clinic.

"You book, you drive up, roll down your window, roll up your sleeve, get a jab. It's that easy," Department of Health deputy secretary Naomi Bromley said in making the announcement.

At an invitation-only soft launch on Sunday, people drove up to parking bays, spoke to a healthcare worker, and received their dose.

Lisa Smith, the project director at Western Health's west metro vaccination program, said a proposal for a drive-through vaccination site was put to authorities months ago. But the logistics were finalized and ironed out on butcher's paper in recent days. "It's been absolutely phenomenal in terms of the effort to turn this around," Ms. Smith said.

People will remain in their cars throughout the process, something Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton says will make it "almost impossible to infect someone else". The planning included looking at how countries such as Israel and the United States had successfully used drive-through sites for vaccination. "Unsurprisingly, most of the [ATAGI] guidelines are around traffic management," Ms. Smith said.

"And obviously the management if somebody was to have an adverse reaction, and those align with what we would do in a vaccination center anyway. The added complexity is traffic management."

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