MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGED CARE, MARK BUTLER: Thanks for coming out this morning at the terrific Women's and Children's Hospital. I'm joined by three amazing women who are going to speak with us, and Spencer, who's already spat on his first politician at a very young age - a gorgeous, gorgeous, healthy young boy. This is a really exciting day for young Australians, for babies and their moms. RSV is the leading cause of hospitalisation of babies in Australia. Every winter, around 12,000 babies are hospitalised through RSV, and as many as a quarter of them have to spend time in an intensive care unit. This winter has been a really hard one, with more RSV cases recorded than last year. And so parents and clinicians and groups like the Immunisation Foundation of Australia – who we will be hearing from later today – have been arguing really hard, working really hard, campaigning hard for governments to come up with an answer to this RSV challenge.
And I'm really pleased today that we're able to announce what I think is the most comprehensive RSV vaccination and protection program for babies anywhere in the world. What we're announcing today is that a new maternal vaccine, Abrysvo which is made by Pfizer, will be added to the National Immunisation Program, and as a result, available for all pregnant women in their third trimester completely free of charge. Without the addition to the immunisation program, families would be paying around $300 for this vaccine, and as I say, it will now be available free of charge, at a cost to government of around $175 million over the coming four years. We've got some good experience with maternal vaccines. The whooping cough vaccine achieves about an 80% uptake rate for pregnant women. It is delivered at about the same time: the RSV vaccine can be delivered around 28 weeks pregnant. So we have good confidence that there will be a significant uptake of this maternal vaccine by pregnant Australian women.
What happens is that the woman develops antibodies to the RSV virus, and those antibodies pass through the placenta to the foetus and are kept by the newborn baby for their first several months of life, after birth, which is the most dangerous period in terms of an RSV infection. What we've also done, though, working with state governments, is to develop a national program for a second protection against RSV, particularly for babies whose mother has chosen not to take up the Abrysvo vaccine option. And that is a monoclonal antibody treatment which is administered to babies again by injection, usually in their first few days after birth. This is also a highly effective protection against RSV for the first five or six months of the baby's life. Very important to ensure that if the mother has not been vaccinated against RSV during pregnancy, that the baby is able to receive that treatment, particularly leading into the winter season. We worked really hard with state governments to ensure that we can we can guarantee a supply of this other treatment, Beyfortus, that will be sufficient for state governments to offer this to mothers and babies and families immediately after the birth of their beautiful baby, if their mother has not been vaccinated against RSV. And this should ensure that we have pretty much 100% coverage against RSV for newborn babies. As I said, the Immunisation Foundation says that around 12,000 babies are hospitalised every year for RSV, usually in their first two years of life, and particularly in their first six months. We're confident that this program, this vaccination and protection program, being so comprehensive, will be able to cut that hospitalisation rate somewhere between 80 and 90 per cent. Just an extraordinary achievement and contribution to what we all want in this community, which is really, really healthy babies. So I'm delighted to be joined by Helen Marshall, I think is going to speak to us first, correct anything I've said that's wrong about the clinical impact of this vaccine, and ask answer your really tricky questions in due course. And then we'll hear from Catherine, who's been such a driver of maternal and baby vaccines through her founding and driving off the Immunisation Foundation of Australia. Thank you, Helen.
ADELAIDE WOMEN’S AND CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL, VACCINOLOGY AND IMMUNOLOGY RESEARCH TRIALS UNIT, MEDICAL DIRECTOR, PROFESSOR HELEN MARSHALL AM: Thank you. Professor Helen Marshall from University of Adelaide and consultant vaccinology at the Women's and Children's Health Network. This is an absolute gamechanger for Australian babies and for their parents. There's nothing worse than bringing your beautiful newborn baby home to then have to take them back to hospital because they're so unwell, with increasing respiratory rate, unable to feed properly, needing oxygen. And for some of those babies, maybe even not only being hospitalised but ending up in intensive care, unable to feed, in absolute respiratory distress and occasionally even dying from this infection. We know that the younger the baby is, the higher the risk of having severe RSV infection and its complications. We know that babies under one are at 10 times the risk of being hospitalised. And it's not only from my own scientific and medical knowledge. I have my own personal experience of having to rush back from a family holiday with three children with my one-year-old with an uncontrollable fever over 40 degrees, increased respiratory rate, listening to her lungs, hearing all those crackles, bringing her to the Women's and Children's Hospital. Fortunately for us, she did not require hospitalisation, but the stress and trauma of that situation, I know personally, as well as from my clinical experience. One of the other nice things about being here at the Women's and Children's Hospital is I lead a vaccine trials unit, and our team were also involved in the pivotal RSV maternal immunisation study that led to licensing of this vaccine. So it's fabulous to see this come full circle and have this vaccine available for all pregnant women across Australia.
IMMUNISATION FOUNDATION OF AUSTRALIA, FOUNDER, CATHERINE HUGHES AM: I'm Catherine Hughes, director and founder of the Immunisation Foundation of Australia. Today's announcement is a monumental milestone in protective health. I thank Minister Butler for this incredible commitment ensuring that all Australian babies in every postcode have access to RSV immunisations. By offering two different immunisation options, we can maximise uptake by catering to different family needs and varying health system dynamics. This comprehensive program is likely to be a world leader in immunisation for RSV. RSV is the number one reason why Australian kids under five are hospitalised each year, and today's announcement will be a huge relief to many families around the country. This program is likely to prevent 10,000 hospitalisations every single year. That's 10,000 families who won't have to watch and wait as their babies struggle to breathe in hospital. We have been calling on all Australians to unite against RSV, and we thank the government for listening and acting.
JOURNALIST: Thank you, Louise, just tell us about your experience with your baby getting RSV.
MOTHER TO BABY SPENCER, LOUISE BOYD: Spencer was a normal, healthy, happy baby. Started to get a bit of a runny nose, temperature, the usual, no feeding, really tired. During the day, I noticed he was progressively getting worse and worse, and then that evening, he was starting to have breathing difficulties, so we took him to the hospital. On the way to the hospital, he became non-responsive, so we had to call an ambulance. The ambulance took him into hospital. He had one admission for four days. Then after he got discharged, he was home for not quite a day, and then started to deteriorate again. Had another ambulance trip and was taken in, put on high flow oxygen, nasogastric tube and IV fluids, and spent another five days in there. So it was not a fun time. It was very stressful, feeling very helpless, not knowing what I could do, not having anything that I could do, and having him not understand that I couldn't help him.
JOURNALIST: How scary was it to see poor little bub, you know, with all these tubes and stuff going through?
BOYD: It was very confronting, and he did not enjoy having the tubes anywhere, trying to pull them out, and he's too little to understand that they're doing a good thing for him.
JOURNALIST: Do you wish this free vaccine was available for you guys?
BOYD: Yes, when I did find out that he had RSV, I was very cranky, because I knew that some other states had it and wasn't available to him. So I'm very happy that it's going to be nationally available, and no other family should have to go through what we went through, because it was not fun.
JOURNALIST: What does it mean that today's announcement gives the opportunity for you, but also other mothers and the opportunity to vaccinate themselves against RSV.
BOYD: I think as a mother or a parent in general, you want to do anything you can to protect your child, and if you can do it, same as the whopping cough vaccine, I would have done it if it had been available. So thank you.
JOURNALIST: Minister, was this kind of a long time coming – this free vaccination – was the last couple of winters been of particular concern?
BUTLER: This is a huge investment in the health of our beautiful babies, it will make a huge difference and reduce thousands and thousands of hospitalisations every single winter. We only received the first recommendation from the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee to add this vaccine abryvso to the National Immunisation program during the last winter, or just at the beginning of the last winter. So I'm really delighted we've been able to get a pricing arrangement with the company and ensure that this will be in place for the next winter. And as I said, we've also managed to secure sufficient supplies of the other protection, which is the other treatment given to babies immediately after they're born, to ensure that all states are able to offer that to families who might not have undertaken the maternal vaccine as well. So it's a bit of a “belt and braces” approach. We now have a really quite extraordinary protection program for young babies here in Australia.
JOURNALIST: Are you confident of the uptake of the vaccine? Although it's free, you know, mothers still have to go and get the vaccine.
BUTLER: We've modelled it on the uptake of the whooping cough vaccine, which Louise just talked about. This is something that that the Immunisation Foundation pushed so strongly for almost a decade ago now, and has been available free of charge for pregnant mums now for years, and has about an 80% uptake. So we've modelled our projections on that. We think that there will be about the same uptake. It can be delivered at about the same time of pregnancy, around 28 weeks. It's best between 28 and 36 weeks of pregnancy. Everyone wants their baby to be healthy, and we see that in the uptake of whooping cough vaccines, and for those who, for some reason haven't been or chosen not to get the vaccine during pregnancy, as I said, there's this fall back. Incredibly effective treatment that babies can be administered shortly after their birth.
JOURNALIST: How important that financial relief as well, having previously, you know, needing to pay $300 and now it's free. How important is that for you know, mothers that were struggling?
BUTLER: We're so focused on making medicines cheaper. And it was 12 months ago, we made a huge investment in the health of older Australians with the most comprehensive shingles vaccine program in the world. A very big investment by government, but an important one for the health of older Australians. Around 2 million have taken that up. It was otherwise going to cost them $560 to get that protection, which many older Australians would find hard to afford. Again when you’re preparing for the birth of your beautiful baby, but a whole lot of financial pressures that families face. So being able to deliver this vaccine, along with whooping cough vaccine and potentially the flu vaccine as well, for pregnant mums free of charge, means that they can go and get these vaccines and have real confidence that while they're pregnant, they're delivering really good antibodies to their baby before birth that will protect them after the birth.
JOURNALIST: What's the effectiveness of the vaccine during studies?
PROFESSOR MARSHALL: With the RSV maternal immunisation, if you're measuring effectiveness in preventing RSV in that infant, at three months, it's about 80% and then by six months, it's about 70%. So it just wanes a little bit. But both products are showing high effectiveness in clinical trials. With the monoclonal antibody, there is real world data out there now showing sustaining of that effectiveness. We've seen in the clinical trials at around 80% against hospitalisation, which is fabulous. With the maternal vaccine, they're working on the data at the moment in the states, they've had the maternal vaccine program commence earlier than we have, and so they're working on having some real evidence available on effectiveness.
JOURNALIST: Just for my clarification, can you, after having the vaccination, can you still get RSV and it kind of reduces the severity?
PROFESSOR MARSHALL: No vaccine is 100% effective. What the vaccine and the monoclonal antibody treatments have shown is that they're highly effective: so 80% in ensuring that babies don't end up in hospital, don't end up in ICU. We're not going to eliminate every case of RSV, but we're going to stop deaths. We're going to stop babies ending up with serious disease and requiring hospitalisation.
JOURNALIST: A new report has revealed 339 complaints in just nine months at Parliament House, including reports of serious wrongdoing like rape and sexual assault. How would you describe the culture here?
BUTLER: These are deeply concerning reports, obviously, several years now after the Set The Standard Report, and after we've now established the structures for people working in and around Parliament to be able to make complaints. Still having some hundreds of complaints and some dozens of sexual complaints would be a concern to anyone working in Parliament, or anyone in Australia that expects, frankly, their Parliament to have much better standards. So there's a lot more work to do. We want to make sure that Parliament is a safe place to work, as every other workplace in Australia should be. This simply isn't good enough.
JOURNALIST: How would you describe the culture currently?
BUTLER: The culture still needs improvement. The number of complaints being made is the most obvious evidence of that. I'm pleased that we've been able to establish structures that people feel confident reporting these complaints to. But the fact there are still so many complaints, including complaints of a sexual nature, does not reflect well on Parliament. We need to do better.
JOURNALIST: Would you say it's a safe place to work currently?
BUTLER: For a few 100 people who've had to make complaints, it's not a safe place to work. We want to make sure we can continue to drive those complaints down. But having structures that make people feel confident that they can make a complaint safely, I think, is a significant improvement, and I'm glad we accepted that recommendation from the Set The Standard Report. But clearly, there is a long way to go culturally to make the Parliament a fully safe place to work.
JOURNALIST: And how does the Government plan to change the culture? What will they do with the information in this report?
BUTLER: We want to take some time to consider that. That's not my direct responsibility, but I know the Minister for Women and Public Service, Katy Gallagher, will be looking at this carefully, as will the Presiding Officers, the Speaker and the President of the Senate, who have responsibility for the operations of Parliament as well. There's been really good cross-party collaboration here, including the crossbench. This is something we all feel a real deep sense of responsibility about. And this latest report is another wakeup call that we've got to do better in the Parliament to provide a safe place to work for all staff.
JOURNALIST: Minister, just quickly. Do you have the stats on how many babies have died per year on average from RSV?
BUTLER: There are around 12,000 babies hospitalised every year. On average, this year, there are about 80,000 babies and kids under four who were reported as having RSV. That's about half the entire number of Australians who got RSV, which really gives you a sense of how vulnerable babies are for this particular virus. I'm happy to say that this year, there are no recorded deaths of babies from RSV. There are deaths in the community, they were all Australians over the age of 50, so we haven't had the tragedy of a baby death from RSV this year. There have been in the past, and what we want to do is prevent them in the future. So this is a really big deal for the health of our babies. As we've said a couple of times now, this is the biggest cause of babies having to go to hospital in their first year of life, particularly their first six months. And they often end up very, very sick: about one in four of them in the intensive care unit, with a whole lot of you know, ongoing consequences after they're released from hospital. So I'm pleased to say we haven't recorded a death in winter 2024. We're determined to repeat that next year as well, with this world leading vaccination and protection program, but I really want to drive down those hospitalisation numbers as well, most importantly, for the sake of babies and their parents. But also, we've got to start relieving some of the pressure on the hospital system that we know happens through winter. Thank you.
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