The Greens say that the Government will miss out on opportunities to expand and diversify Australia’s vaccine portfolio if they don’t invest in public capacity to produce mRNA vaccines
“We cannot only rely on the AstraZeneca vaccine, we need to have a diverse portfolio to rapidly pivot to deal with new strains, including public facilities to produce supplies in Australia”, Greens spokesperson on Health Senator Rachel Siewert said.
“The Government should immediately invest in developing Australia’s capacity to locally manufacture vaccines and medicines that use mRNA technology. mRNA technology is likely to revolutionise vaccine and drug development and Australia could be at the forefront of this.
“We need a public health response that is publicly funded.
“In addition we need to ramp up CSL’s capacity to start locally producing Novavax at the same time as AstraZeneca given the promising Phase 3 Trial data, this will increase our vaccine diversity and ensure that we can vaccinate people in Australia and those in the regions.”
