CORONAVIRUS
— HEALTH MODELLING — OMICRON VARIANT
4. Ms M.J. DAVIES to the Minister for Health:
I refer to the concerns Professor George
Milne of the University of Western Australia raised on 9 February that delays
to reopening the border is having negative health impacts and the minister's
dismissive response that Professor Milne is ''not an epidemiologist; he's
a mathematician''.
(1) What modelling is the Chief
Health Officer's advice to government based on?
(2) If Professor
Milne is not qualified, as the minister asserts, why was he relied on by this
government for previous Delta strain modelling?
Ms A.
SANDERSON replied:
(1)–(2) As the Premier has outlined very clearly and I have
outlined numerous times in numerous press conferences over the last two
months—I think it is—modelling is one part of the equation when
making decisions. These decisions will affect people's lives and their
livelihoods. Professor Milne has been used by the Department of Health and he
worked with the department previously. He has not been involved in the modelling
being undertaken by the department currently. There are a whole range of
factors that are used to determine decision-making and to determine the advice
of the Chief Health Officer.
The government will release the
modelling when it is complete. The reality is that any Omicron modelling right now is not complete; it does not have a full
dataset to back it up. The Delta modelling had six months' worth of data to inform our decision to put in
place the safe transition plan. The 5 February date was based on Delta
modelling for which we had six months' worth of data. We have a very
different disease here. What we saw, getting closer to 5 February, was the
crippling impact of furloughing of staff across sectors, hundreds of people
dying—2 000 people have died since December last year. If that was a number
of plane crashes, that would be an absolute outrage; there would be inquiries.
That is not happening.
The opposition chooses to remain
completely oblivious to those numbers. It is very easy to commentate from the sidelines when you are not making the
decisions that will affect people's lives and their livelihoods.
It is very easy to do that. The advice that we take is from the statutory
officer—the Chief Health Officer—and he is an expert in this field. That is the person from whom we take
advice. As we got closer to 5 February, as members opposite would also know if they had been watching this over
Christmas, the paediatric vaccine program was not commenced by the
commonwealth until 10 January. That was three weeks before school was to start—three
weeks for people to get their kids vaccinated. We had a great take-up and we
threw everything we had at that vaccination
program—we had a big boost and blitzes in place. But people wanted
to get their kids vaccinated before they started school, and that bought time
to do that.
We also needed to give people who
were not eligible for the booster the opportunity to get that booster to protect themselves against Omicron. The
opposition may obsess about modelling—the government will
release modelling when it is complete—but modelling is not the only
factor when we are making these decisions that affect people's lives
and their livelihoods.