Commonwealth COVID Inquiry
Background
During the COVID-19 Pandemic, the Commonwealth Government committed to launch a wide-reaching inquiry into COVID-19 at an appropriate time. On 21 September 2023, the Prime Minister announced an inquiry that included a range of topics including preventative health measures, personal protective equipment and supply chain issues.
The inquiry included a strict page limit that restricted our ability to communicate the details of research supporting our recommendations.
GAP’s submission
GAP’s submission recommended that:
- Governments should pursue practical programs in Australia and overseas that reduce the risk of zoonoses.
- The new Australian CDC develop a strategy for the early detection of novel pathogens.
- Reliably clean indoor air be normalised.
- Research funding should be directed towards UV germicidal irradiation.
- Mitigations specifically target the possibility that the next pandemic is a lab leak or intentionally engineered.
- Pandemic planning should account for the possibility that future pandemics could be worse than COVID-19.
Australians for Pandemic Prevention submission
GAP volunteered its support and expertise to a coalition of leading experts. As “Australians for Pandemic Prevention”, we made a submission with 8 key recommendations. We recommended that the Australian Government should:
- Affirm that the Australian Centre for Disease Control should prioritise the prevention of pandemics – natural, accidental and intentional.
- Implement practical measures to reduce the risk of zoonoses.
- Review biosafety practices and requirements for research involving human or animal pathogens, at a laboratory and national level, to ensure any balancing of risk properly accounts for the global consequences of incidents.
- Develop a framework to safeguard against engineered pandemics, including enhancing access controls and screening for certain technologies, such as high-risk synthetic DNA.
- Operate and coordinate pathogen-agnostic metagenomic surveillance in strategic locations – like aviation wastewater and human-livestock interfaces – to allow the early identification and assessment of novel pathogens.
- Develop and regularly exercise a national plan to contain and eliminate novel pathogen outbreaks with pandemic potential.
- Develop an indoor air quality strategy with practical measures to make indoor air safer, including implementing mature technologies in high-risk settings.
- Fund research into promising pathogen reduction technologies, including far-UVC light, and evolve the indoor air quality strategy as new technology becomes available.