Health Minister orders fast-tracked review into existing vaccines

Health Minister Mark Butler has ordered a fast-tracked review into existing vaccine deals and whether there needs to be changes to current agreements to shore up Australia's future supplies.

The inquiry will be led by senior public servant Jane Halton, who also oversaw the national review of hotel quarantine arrangements.

Butler said that the review would not act as a deeper inquiry into the previous government's response to the outbreak, but instead would focus on giving advice to the government about what it should focus on in the next few years.

He said that there will be a time for a proper inquiry into the country's response to the Pandemic, whether that is a royal commission or some other very deep inquiry by the Senate committee.

It is not about looking back and looking at the rights and wrongs of the former government's approach to negotiating these contracts in the first place.

It's about the next 12 to 18 months. The Health Minister said the key elements of the review would be:

Butler said he didn't make any judgement about the existing deals, but he said the focus was on making sure Australia could adapt to future developments of the disease and vaccines.

He said that he doesn't have any reason to think that the vaccine deals aren't appropriate, but this is a fast-moving landscape.

We need to be agile here. The Health Minister said there was urgency to it, even though he had not set a deadline for the review.

He said that it's something we want to conduct in weeks, not many months.

Butler defended the decision to have the review done by Ms Halton and not the health department, saying he did not think it was out of the ordinary that the new government would want an independent opinion on deals done while it was in opposition.

The Australian Medical Association AMA president Omar Khorshid said it was important to make sure the best treatments, such as Omicron-specific vaccines, are available as quickly as possible in the future.

He said that it's absolutely critical that we have access to the new vaccines that are coming online as soon as they are shown to be safe and effective.