Tuesday, 7 June 2022

 Mr ANGUS (Forest Hill) (19:10): (6400) I raise a matter of importance for the attention of the Minister for Health. The action I seek is for the minister to provide me with a list of the practising medical professionals that are not employed by the Victorian state government, the Australian federal government or an academic organisation who are providing advice to the Victorian government regarding its management of the COVID-19 situation here in Victoria.

I raise this matter as I was contacted recently by a medical professional who I spoke to last week. This person then met with me at length to detail their concerns with the way the COVID-19 situation has been handled here in Victoria. They advised me that since COVID-19 was first detected in Victoria more than two years ago they had treated more than 8000 patients with COVID, which is a staggering number of patients. They also advised me that all of their huge number of COVID patients had lived, and none had been hospitalised. Less than half of these patients were vaccinated for COVID-19, with the remainder being unvaccinated. The median age of their COVID patients was 58 years and included a patient over 100 years old, with no patients with COVID younger than 18 years old being treated at all due to the negligible risk, unless they had other illnesses. This medical expert is receiving between 40 and 50 new referrals from medical practitioners per day from all around Australia. They are highly sought after and are providing a much-needed service to assist Victorians with COVID to ensure they avoid severe illnesses and hospitalisation.

My concern and the concern of many Victorians is that the Victorian government is not seeking out and listening to the opinions of extremely experienced experts who are working at the coalface treating COVID-19 patients and ensuring they avoid hospitalisation and poor health outcomes, including long COVID. Rather it appears the government is continuing to listen to and take advice from the same people it has been listening to over the past two years.

Minister, given, firstly, the ongoing number of COVID cases here in Victoria amongst both vaccinated and unvaccinated people, secondly, the obvious strain on the hospital system due to various reasons and, thirdly, the fact that there is a general reluctance of medical professionals to actually treat COVID-19 until a patient is requiring hospitalisation, a lot could be learned by you and your medical advisers as to how to successfully treat COVID patients to ensure they recover quickly and do not need to be hospitalised. This medical professional is willing to share their learnings and experience to assist the Victorian government to finally manage and control the COVID-19 situation here in Victoria.