Health exports welcome national pandemic inquiry
Health experts have welcomed the new inquiry into Australia's response to the COVID pandemic. It's set to examine key health measures including the use of PPE and vaccination, as well as support offered to the individuals and businesses. Epidemiologist Nancy Baxter says politicians of all stripes need to be held accountable.
Transcript
00:00 I think it's really quite important that we learn from our experience because, you know,
00:06 I know this isn't what viewers want to hear, but we are likely to experience another pandemic
00:11 in our lifetime.
00:13 And obviously learning from our experiences is essential to doing better the next time.
00:18 Some of the decisions that were made initially ended up requiring certain things to happen
00:24 during the course of the pandemic.
00:25 So early decisions that were made, made other decisions later on necessary.
00:30 So obviously taking a good hard look at what happened and how it influenced how Australia
00:36 experienced the pandemic is really, really important if we want to actually do things
00:43 better next time.
00:44 So, you know, I think they're going to have to take a cold, hard look at what happened
00:50 in the country and the benefits that came of it, you know, because we think about our
00:57 experience in the pandemic and, you know, it affected people very greatly.
01:02 But we also have to think about the counterfactual.
01:06 So what could have happened if we had done things differently?
01:10 And I think that's why it's important to also get a bit of the international experience
01:13 in.
01:14 And the remit of this task force actually allows them to look at international experience
01:20 too.
01:21 So to be able to place this in context with the rest of the world, if we had done things
01:25 differently, what might things have looked like in Australia?
01:28 And I think that's an important perspective too, because if you just look at the things
01:31 that happened in Australia, you don't kind of consider what we were trying to prevent,
01:35 which we can see in other jurisdictions.
01:37 [BLANK_AUDIO]