Prof Sharon Lewin AO will lead the AUSiMED delegation.
AUSiMED’s September delegation of eminent Australian public health officials and scientists are holding high-level information exchanges with their Israeli counterparts focussing in the main on COVID-19 management.
Led by Prof Sharon Lewin AO, director of the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, and co-chair of the National COVID-19 Health and Research Advisory Council, the delegation includes Dr Kerry Chant, NSW chief health officer, Professor Allen Cheng – former co-chair of the ATAGI COVID-19 Working Group, vaccine expert Associate Professor Nigel Crawford and others who have helped guide our government’s pandemic policy.
The delegation are meeting top Israeli health officials and practitioners to further deepen the person-to-person networks between Australia and Israel and inform ongoing management of the COVID-19 pandemic and potentially other infectious diseases in the future.
Australia’s strict social distancing guidelines, travel bans and use of mathematical modelling to guide public policy resulted in one of the world’s lowest death rates from the virus.
Israel became a world leader in real-time research, analysis and data integration at the height of the pandemic. Israel also led a successful vaccination drive and had the fastest vaccine rollout.
Lewin observed,
On this tour, we’re hoping to learn a lot more about Israel’s health informatics and data systems, and how similar approaches could be integrated into the Australian public health response. We will also be looking at Israel’s vaccine rollout to vulnerable and vaccine-hesitant communities.
The Israeli participants in the mission are very interested in learning about our strategies for public engagement. These involved science, modelling and rational planning. A number of the modellers who were key to Australia’s COVID-19 roadmap, as well as leading virologists who developed COVID-19 vaccines, are also members of our delegation. One of the most important discoveries Australia made during the pandemic was linking antibody levels following vaccination to clinical outcomes and the Israelis also want to learn more about that.
The mission was organised by Hadassah Australia’s medical research associate, AUSiMED, which fosters collaborative biomedical research and knowledge exchange between world-leading clinicians and scientists in Australia and Israel.
Noting Australia and Israel are strategic partners in trade, culture and health, AUSiMED chair Antony Cohen said that “both have much to offer each other and the rest of the world in terms of COVID-19 learnings”.
Reported widely in the Australian Jewish media, the importance of the delegation’s visit to Israel cannot be overestimated.
And a wonderful announcement in the last few days for Prof Lewin and the Doherty Institute, with the receipt of the largest donation in Australian medical research history. The donation of $250 million has come to the University of Melbourne to establish The Cumming Global Centre for Pandemic Therapeutics to be based initially within the Doherty and led by Prof Lewin. The Centre will be dedicated to developing therapeutic treatments which stop a virus from replicating.