Response to Consultation on Development of the National Immunisation Strategy 2025–2030

This document records Research Australia’s survey responses to the Department of Health and Aged Care’s May 2024 consultation paper on the next National Immunisation Strategy for 2025–2030, with answers kept brief by the survey’s character limits. It suggests rewording the Vision as an end state and changing the Mission to ‘Improve vaccine uptake and effectiveness in Australia’. Across the priority areas it maintains that researchers in universities and medical research institutes should be explicitly engaged to design, test and evaluate initiatives on coverage and community engagement, and that the Strategy should commit to secure sharing of immunisation data with researchers, noting their modelling contributions during COVID-19. It recommends social science research into how the withdrawal of the Vaxzevria vaccine and long COVID among vaccinated people may have fuelled vaccine scepticism, and for an expert panel of research organisations and industry, possibly under the Australian Centre for Disease Control (CDC), to advise on emerging vaccine technologies. On emergency preparedness, it maintains that strengthening existing partnerships is not enough and recommends an end-to-end assessment of Australian vaccine research and development capability, citing omitted initiatives such as the BioCina mRNA partnership in South Australia, the University of Queensland, Sanofi and Emory collaboration and the NSW RNA Production and Research Network. It also recommends that the Strategy define the CDC’s coordinating role, draw on the COVID-19 Response Inquiry, and recognise the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance.