Health Minister Mark Butler says Australia is one of the few countries that doesn’t have a Centre for Disease Control and establishing one would provide “transparent evidence-based” advice if there is another pandemic. Australia will spend $252 million on a US-style Centre for Disease Control to try to overcome gaps between levels of governments and their agencies, which allowed misinformation and fuelled public distrust of health measures to contain COVID-19.
“What it would do is ensure that there was transparent evidence-based advice given about the response,” Butler said on ABC radio. “One of the conclusions of the report, a really important conclusion, is that after the initial response when really we were trying to understand what was happening, we didn’t shift to a more evidence-based approach, which that there was an analysis of the risks and the benefits of a particular decision.