It was a moment millions of Australians had been waiting for.

On Sunday, 84-year-old Jane Malysiak rolled up her sleeve as a nurse readied a syringe and delivered her Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine — a vaccine that less than 12 months ago experts predicted could take “years” to make.

As of Friday, the Federal Government said almost 23,000 Australians had been given first injections of the Pfizer jab (there is no running tally, yet).

The early days have been slow going — and in the next weeks it will continue to be.

Delays and limited supply of the Pfizer vaccine mean only small numbers of the Australian population can get the jab until the rollout ramps up in late March.

From then, public health experts predict as many as 200,000 people a day will need to receive the jab for the government to keep its promise of vaccinating all Australians who want it by October.

Health Minister Greg Hunt said there would be “hiccups” along the way — and so far there have been two big ones.

On Friday it was revealed more than 120 doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine were thrown out “out of an abundance of caution” after a possible storage error at a nursing home in Melbourne.

And on Wednesday another one, in the form of a doctor delivering an excessive amount of vaccine.

The experts have since called for calm, with the two Queensland aged cage residents involved showing no ill effects, and the AMA saying that the most significant harm resulting from the incident was likely to be that “a few doses of the vaccine had been wasted”.

Yet it did raise questions about the readiness of the country for this massive logistical exercise — the biggest in public health Australia has ever seen.

Despite the early hiccups, an exclusive survey conducted for the ABC shows that the vast majority of Australians have utmost trust in our health professionals to deliver the vaccine.

The survey, conducted over five days and finishing on Tuesday — before the excess dosage incident and storage errors were revealed — shows 65 per cent of Australians have “a great deal of trust” in healthcare professionals, with 24 per cent having a “moderate trust”.

Trust in health care workers

How much trust do you have in the health care providers administering the COVID-19 vaccines?

Source: Vox Pop Labs Get the data Created with Datawrapper

Only 8 per cent said they had “little trust” or “no trust at all”.

According to University of Sydney vaccine acceptance researcher and World Health Organization adviser Julie Leask, the numbers around trust of healthcare providers are “pivotal”.

“It is particularly important to vaccine acceptance at a national level,” Professor Leask said.

“When people make vaccination decisions they ask themselves who’s telling me this? And do I trust them? — particularly when they’re navigating around the uncertainty.

“And looking at the numbers I guess 8 per cent [with no or little trust] is not to be sneezed at, but it is still relatively small. But then again I’m glad to see 89 per cent feel the opposite.”