Angie Bell (Moncrieff, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Industry, Science and Technology. Can the minister please inform the House about how the Morrison government is backing the development of a COVID vaccine to drive our health and economic recovery?

Karen Andrews (McPherson, Liberal Party, Minister for Industry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for her question. As the minister for science, I've been working very closely with Australia's national science agency, the CSIRO. The work that the CSIRO are doing is very central to international vaccine efforts. They have been working closely in this area since the start of the pandemic. They have been leading the evaluation on vaccine candidates from the UK and the US, including the very promising Oxford vaccine. Much of this research work is actually being undertaken at the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness, which is the CSIRO's high-containment biosecurity facility in Victoria. It's actually the only lab of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere. Recently, our government invested over $220 million to enhance this very important facility.

Some of the work that the CSIRO has been doing is to evaluate different administration methods of the vaccine to determine which is the most effective method. We do know that early data has enabled the vaccine from Oxford to progress on to phase 3 clinical trials, where there will be broad testing of somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 people. Of course, the CSIRO has also been working on the University of Queensland vaccine, and trials have commenced on that vaccine here at home in Australia. Both the Oxford vaccine and the University of Queensland vaccine are very promising, and they are cause for hope. But we should all be well aware that there is no guarantee for a vaccine. There's no guarantee that either of these will be successful. But it is important that we are in the best possible position that we possibly can be when such a vaccine is made available to us.

We have been very determined as a government to make sure that there are ways for us to live and to work in the COVID environment in which we find ourselves. It is very important that we look at ways that we can live and that we can work, because the first step cannot be to shut down our economy. We have been very clear from the start that this is a battle that we need to fight on a health basis and also on an economic basis. What we are seeing is work from this government to make sure that we are attacking this virus on both fronts. Our businesses are working hard to make sure that they can do all that they can to remain open, and we encourage them to do that. Together, we will make sure that Australia is in the best possible position to come through this recovery.