From March 9, 2021 A Conversation with Dr. Anthony Fauci and Professor Paul Kelly Katherine E Bliss "So I wanted to kind of end by asking you to reflect on what you see for the future of cooperation on regional and global health security between the United States and Australia. And how can the two countries work together and with other countries, you know, throughout the world to prepare for future pandemics and health emergencies?
So Paul Kelly, let me turn to you to start."
Dr. Paul Kelly: Yeah. Thanks, Katherine. And you’re quite right that, of course, Australia and the U.S. have a longstanding relationship on many levels. In 2020 there was a ministerial agreement in relation to the Indo-Pacific region in particular. And that covers a wide-ranging cooperation, including training, laboratory support, epidemiology, development of drugs and vaccines, and so forth, for our shared region in the Pacific and also more broadly in the Indo-Pacific.
So Australia is very much committed to exactly what you were mentioning, particularly in our region. So Pacific-island states are very much front and center for our support, not only in the vaccines themselves but the actual end-to-end rollout of the vaccines, as well as strengthening of surveillance activities, quarantine, and the like. So that’s going to continue.
We have supported the COVAX initiative, as you mentioned, a very important component of that vaccine rollout in low- and middle-income countries. And so we’ll continue to do that. And we very much welcome looking further and more closely with the U.S. in what we can do in our region.
As I said, we are a connected world. And if we ignore that, it’s not only at the peril of the lower- and middle-income countries that can’t afford the sort of things that we can afford in terms of health care and public-health interventions, but also ourselves, not only in the continued production of virus variants but in terms of threats through incursions.
So I think that’s a really important component of our work. We’re particularly looking at concern with countries in our near north, in Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste, where there are emerging outbreaks. And so we need to really consider those in particular. But we certainly look forward to working with the U.S. on these matters into the future.
And I’ll finish this by saying that whilst we have throughout this pandemic, of course, been concentrating on COVID as a specific issue, everything we’ve tried to do here in terms of public-health strengthening in Australia and elsewhere has had an eye on the larger prize. There’s no point in planning for the – only for this pandemic. We have to consider what the next pandemic is going to be like. And so those generic strengthening elements are really important.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/conversation-dr-anthony-fauci-and-professor-paul-kelly