Thursday, 4 August 2022

COVID-19 vaccination

Mr ANGUS (Forest Hill) (17:28): (6474) Speaker, I congratulate you on your election to high office earlier this week.

I raise a matter of importance for the attention of the Minister for Health. The action I seek is for the minister to provide a daily breakdown of the vaccination status of all Victorians hospitalised with COVID-19. I raise this matter as I have been contacted recently by several constituents seeking this information, including vaccinated constituents. Upon trying to locate this information it was apparent that it is no longer available in Victoria. Providing this information to all Victorians would provide more transparency and better inform Victorians around the issues surrounding the ongoing health crisis here in Victoria.

I note that the lack of disclosure of this information in Victoria stands in stark contrast to some other jurisdictions, such as New South Wales. The last time the basic vaccination status of patients hospitalised with COVID-19 in Victoria was publicly disclosed was on 26 January this year, when there were 1089 people in Victorian hospitals, with 77.2 per cent noted as being fully vaccinated. No data is available regarding the 743 COVID-19 patients in Victorian hospitals yesterday. This contrasts with New South Wales where this information is regularly available, with the latest data available being for the weekend of 23 July 2022. The New South Wales data at that time showed that of the 918 people in New South Wales hospitals, 692 people, or 75.4 per cent, were vaccinated, with 225 people, or 24.6 per cent, having an unknown vaccinated status. This leaves one person, or 0.1 per cent of hospitalised people, recorded as unvaccinated. Of the people hospitalised in New South Wales at that time, 24.1 per cent had received four or more doses of COVID-19 vaccine, 31.8 per cent had received three COVID-19 vaccine doses and 18 per cent had received two COVID vaccine doses—a total of 73.9 per cent vaccinated patients.

Having similar information available for Victorians would assist people with their health management. It may well also assist the government as it tries to deal with the current crisis in the health system here in Victoria. It is now very clear that, whatever one’s initial view of the COVID-19 vaccination program, it is clearly not working as intended. Consequently it is incumbent on the Victorian government to look at what is actually going on, inform Victorians accordingly and look at options to address this situation. Minister, I urge you to release this important information on a daily basis, both to inform all Victorians as to what is happening in our hospitals and to inform the government so it can ensure this situation is being properly managed and changes to the previous approach can be made as required.