The best defence is...?

LINE OF DEFENCE

A timeline of Australian Defence Force communications provided to The Age, The Australian ($) and the Herald Sun ($) suggests that 100 officials were sent to support Victoria a week before the mandatory hotel program was announced by national cabinet. Reportedly, standing offers for support were not included in a Victoria Police quarantine plan, and at a crucial, rushed Emergency Management Victoria planning meeting on March 27 it was instead decided to use private security guards for hotel quarantine.

With the revelations set to increase political pressure on Dan Andrews, who yesterday repeated claims ADF never offered assistance to guard hotels, state government sources have told The Age “that the premier was likely to argue that the ADF offers were made to agencies of the government, not at cabinet level”.

Finally, while the interplay between these departmental decisions might seem like a headache — there’s about to be an inquiry into it, after all — The Age reports that Victorian Jobs Minister Martin Pakula yesterday offered the state government’s first detailed description of roles, telling a parliamentary committee his department was responsible for “things like logistics” while the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) was in charge of infection control.

PS: The Australian ($) also reports that a COVID-positive woman — who had suffered a recent assault, was mentally disturbed, agitated and hostile towards staff — left voluntary isolation at the Brady Hotel seven hours after checking in, then jumped on a tram without being stopped by police or DHHS officials.

AGED CARE UNDER THE MICROSCOPE

On the federal end of the pandemic, the Herald Sun reports that a detailed review of Sydney’s Dorothy Henderson Lodge outbreak in March warned the federal government that the outbreak’s biggest challenge was a sudden loss of staff.

The April 14 report by the NSW Clinical Excellence Commission was submitted to the aged care royal commission this week, where the ABC reports that officials have taken issue with geriatrician Joseph Ibrahim’s claim that “hundreds of residents are and will die prematurely because people have failed to act”.

Elsewhere, The Sydney Morning Herald reports that aged care operators have been left waiting for core elements of an $812.8 million federal COVID-19 plan, with a wage bonus for workers not paid until last month and that other measures will potentially be left unfinished until June 2021.

PS: Criticism of the Morrison government is clearly starting to show, with The Conversation reporting that Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy was asked to be slotted into this week’s public hearing and then had to, effectively, be put in his place after breaking procedures to dispute claims the government had not planned for outbreaks.

RUSSIA BITES BACK

According to the BBC, Russian Health Minister Mikhail Murashko has hit back at global criticism of the government granting regulatory approval for a vaccine — “Gam-COVID-Vac” or “Sputnik-V” for fun — after less than two months of human testing, claiming that “foreign colleagues are sensing the specific competitive advantages of the Russian drug and are trying to express opinions that … are absolutely groundless”.

With public information limited largely to descriptions of two small trials conducted on just 76 people, global scientists and health officials have denounced the approval as premature (“We do not know the methodology or the results of their clinical trials,” said researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research Isabelle Imbert) and potentially dangerous (“It could pretty much kill the acceptance of vaccination if it goes wrong” said German Health Minister Jens Spahn).

PS: For a much more interesting defence against “scepticism among international media and politicians”, check out chief executive officer of the Russian Direct Investment Fund Kirill Dmitriev’s column at the brand new Sputnik-V website, Forbidden op-ed: The Sputnik vaccine as a lifesaving global partnership.

Apparently, the piece — which details the apparent science behind the vaccine; alleges results from those two trials will be released this month ahead a stage three, 2000-odd trial across Russia, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Brazil; and recounts Soviet-era technical marvels — was “rejected by all leading Western media”. Which, um, where was Crikey’s pitch?

AN UNEASY CLIMATE

Finally, in case we needed a reminder of how Australia is handling our next, much larger crisis, The Guardian reports that industry and environment groups have questioned the point of the Coalition government’s “safeguard mechanism” after companies including BHP, Anglo American and Tomago Aluminium were all given the green light to increase emissions by a combined 1.6m tonnes of carbon dioxide a year in late July.