New centre could help avoid repeat of quarantine disaster

The newly announced Australian Institute for Infectious Disease could give health experts a direct line to government and help to prevent the kind of disastrous outbreaks that have been seen in hotel quarantine and on cruise ships.

It is also hoped that the centre will provide an earlier response to new diseases in the region, amid warnings that Australia could encounter an even more dangerous pandemic than COVID-19 in the future.

The centre will aim to prevent a repeat of this year's pandemic.Credit: Peter Braig

The Victorian government announced on Friday that it will commit $155 million to begin establishing the centre they say will lead the fight against future outbreaks once construction of a new building in Parkville is complete in about 2025.

Premier Daniel Andrews said it would help develop cures and vaccines, bringing together leading experts at many of the nation’s top infectious diseases institutions, including the Doherty and Burnet institutes.

“This will be the biggest of its kind anywhere in our region [and] it will be a national centre,” Mr Andrews said.

But with the federal government yet to commit any funding to the institute, it remains unclear if it will be able to live up to its promise to be a national initiative, especially given how difficult it has been for states to agree on key issues during the pandemic.

Premier Daniel Andrews prepares for his announcement at the Doherty Institute on Friday.Credit: Joe Armao

Professor John Mathews, a former national deputy chief medical officer, said that while Australia had done “pretty well” managing coronavirus to date, it needed a national body that linked academic expertise to government.

“In Victoria the people who took decisions weren’t informed about infectious disease and that’s why we had the hotel quarantine disaster,” he said.

Private security guards in hotels containing returning travellers who tested positive to COVID-19 were found to have seeded Victoria's second wave of coronavirus, which led to about 800 deaths and a punishing lockdown.

A subsequent inquiry heard that the hotel quarantine scheme had been treated more as a logistic exercise than a health matter.

Earlier in the year, NSW Health had assessed the Ruby Princess cruise ship as “low risk” and the decision was made to let thousands of passengers disembark, many who were infectious.

“The cruise ship problem was directly attributable to the fact that there was no agreement between the Commonwealth and the states about how that should be managed," Professor Mathews said. "Border Force didn’t have medical expertise and the NSW people who got it wrong were quite junior people."

Infectious diseases experts have called for a similar body similar to the United States' Centres for Disease Control and Prevention to be established in Australia, to help streamline states’ responses to border closures, lockdowns and contact tracing.

Burnet Institute epidemiologist Mike Toole, who worked at the CDC for a decade, said the new institute was very different to the US model, being a collaboration of key independent organisations rather than a government body.

Professor Toole said there had been talk about establishing an organisation similar to the CDC in Australia for decades, but states had been unwilling to give away any of their authority.

“Neal Blewett was the minister for health under Bob Hawke and then Keating and he could just not garner that sort of buy-in from the states, who wanted to retain their own mechanism,” he sad.

The Victorian government is seeking $250 million from the federal government for the new centre, but federal Health Minister Greg Hunt told reporters on Friday he had only been texted about the issue late on Thursday night.

He said while he welcomed any state government commitment to research, the Commonwealth had already committed $220 million to develop an Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness and didn’t want to follow the American or European response to COVID-19.

“Our model is the Australian model,” he said.

Professor Toole said if the new institute had been set up before the pandemic hit there may have been closer monitoring of what was occurring in China and south-east Asia. However he couldn’t say if it would have resulted in authorities recognising the threat coronavirus posed earlier.

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