Australia’s Healthcare Crisis: Misplaced Priorities in a Time of Need, By Mrs. Vera West and Brian Simpson

 Australia's healthcare system is buckling under the weight of chronic underfunding, workforce shortages, and critical supply deficits, yet the NSW government has chosen to pour $96 million into a shiny new mRNA factory in Sydney, with an additional $119 million for RNA research. This facility, nearing completion at Macquarie University, is celebrated as a beacon of "transformative" technology, while patients languish in emergency departments for hours and wait years for surgeries. The government's obsession with speculative mRNA ventures, driven by patent-holders and Big Pharma, starkly contrasts with the dire state of basic medical necessities. This blog piece outlines Australia's healthcare crisis and argues that the funds squandered on mRNA infrastructure should have been invested in resolving these immediate, life-threatening issues.

Australia's healthcare system, once a global model, is now a shadow of its former self. The following points highlight the depth of the crisis:

Workforce Shortages: The healthcare sector faces a critical shortage of professionals. By 2025, Australia is projected to have a shortfall of 100,000 nurses, escalating to 123,000 by 2030, alongside a deficit of over 10,000 general practitioners (GPs) by 2031-32. Emergency departments are overwhelmed, with ambulance ramping and staff burnout exacerbating the problem. Rural areas are hit hardest, with far fewer health professionals per capita.

Surging Wait Times: Elective surgery backlogs are catastrophic, with estimates suggesting over 500,000 procedures delayed by mid-2023. Patients endure months or years of pain, with emergency department wait times ballooning due to bed shortages and overworked staff. This delays critical care, leaving patients at risk.

Supply Shortages: A nationwide shortage of IV fluids, including saline, has persisted since at least 2024, forcing doctors to ration essential drips. This crisis, driven by global manufacturing issues and Australia's reliance on imports, disrupts surgeries and treatments like chemotherapy. The lack of domestic production for basic medical supplies highlights a dangerous vulnerability.

Rising Costs and Inaccessibility: Medicare rebates no longer cover the true cost of care, leading to 30% of patients paying an average A$40 out-of-pocket "gap fee" for GP visits. Many Australians, especially in rural areas, are skipping care altogether due to escalating costs, undermining the universal healthcare promise.

Systemic Underfunding: Despite government claims of record health investments, $140 billion projected for 2025-26, the system remains overstretched. Funding prioritises acute care over prevention and fails to address structural inefficiencies, leaving hospitals and primary care under-resourced.

This crisis is not new; it predates Covid-19 but has been worsened by the pandemic's strain. The government's failure to prepare for an aging population and rising chronic disease rates has left the system on the brink.

While Australians struggle to access basic care, the NSW government is fast-tracking a $96 million mRNA factory, set to be operational by early 2026. This facility, a joint venture between RNA Australia and Aurora Biosynthetics (owned by Myeloid Therapeutics), will produce plasmids, RNA strands, and lipid nanoparticles for mRNA products and gene therapies. Another $2 billion Moderna factory in Melbourne, already operational, underscores this fixation on mRNA. These projects are touted as economic drivers, with potential applications in vaccines, pesticides, and cosmetics, but their prioritisation over basic healthcare is indefensible.

Questionable Safety: The Letters from Australia post cites the Hope Accord, signed by over 64,000 people, including 9,000 medical professionals, calling for a ban on mRNA Covid vaccines due to safety concerns. Over 100,000 adverse event reports, including injuries and deaths, are logged in the TGA's Database of Adverse Event Notifications, though underreporting is likely. Despite these red flags, the government barrels forward with mRNA expansion.

Profit Over People: The mRNA "ecosystem" ties public universities, government, and Big Pharma in a web of public-private partnerships. The $183 billion in global mRNA vaccine sales by June 2023 highlights the financial stakes, yet taxpayers foot the bill for these ventures while shareholders reap the rewards.

Bypassing Oversight: The Sydney factory's clinical trial products reportedly bypass rigorous TGA approval, going directly to hospitals and doctors. Meanwhile, Moderna's Melbourne deal, now under audit, exempted its mRNA vaccines from standard Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee scrutiny, raising questions about regulatory integrity.

The $215 million allocated to the Sydney mRNA factory and research could have transformed Australia's healthcare system if redirected to urgent needs:

Boosting Workforce Capacity: Investing in training and retention programs for nurses and GPs could address the projected 100,000-nurse shortfall by 2025. Incentives like scholarships, free meals for shift workers, or rural placement bonuses, as trialled in Victoria, could attract and retain talent.

Securing Medical Supplies: Establishing domestic manufacturing for IV fluids and other critical supplies would mitigate shortages that delay surgeries and endanger lives. The current crisis, expected to persist through 2025, demands urgent action to build sovereign capability.

Reducing Wait Times: Funding additional hospital beds, surgical teams, and streamlined scheduling models, like dedicated teams for specific procedures, could clear the 500,000-surgery backlog. This would alleviate patient suffering and reduce pressure on emergency departments.

Strengthening Primary Care: Increasing Medicare rebates to cover true care costs would reduce out-of-pocket fees, ensuring more Australians can access GPs without financial strain. Expanding telehealth and public clinics in rural areas could bridge accessibility gaps.

The mRNA factory's rapid construction, ground broken in August 2024, nearing completion by early 2026, stands in stark contrast to the government's inaction on IV fluid shortages and surgical delays. This discrepancy reveals a deeper issue: a government enthralled by Big Pharma's promises, valuing speculative technologies over proven necessities. Public-private partnerships, like the RNA Australia-Aurora venture, blur the lines between state, academia, and industry, violating the Nolan Principles of public office integrity. These arrangements create a self-reinforcing "ecosystem" that excludes critical voices and ranks profit over public welfare, echoing historical warnings about fascism's merger of state and corporate power.

The government's claim of a $140 billion health budget by 2025-26 rings hollow when basic supplies run dry and patients wait in agony. The mRNA push, driven by patent-driven urgency and globalised interests, diverts resources from a crumbling healthcare system that serves ordinary Australians. This is not just a misallocation of funds, it's a theft of the public purse, leaving taxpayers to subsidise corporate gains while hospitals struggle to function.

https://lettersfromaustralia.substack.com/p/sydney-rna-factory-nearly-finished

"Sydney's $96 million RNA factory is near completion as the NSW Government pours money into controversial technologies at the expense of basic medical necessities.

"We are now in a position where the walls are going up on the facility so it will probably be operational by the end of this year, beginning of next year," said NSW Chief Scientist & Engineer Professor Hugh Durrant-Whyte at a forum celebrating the "transformative nature" of mRNA on December 4.

Professor Durrant-Whyte told the NSW Science & Research Breakfast Seminar Series forum that mRNA had enabled biology to become engineering.

"You can build structures, you can build machines, you can do amazing things with these new materials," he said.

Introducing the keynote speaker, Myeloid Therapeutics chief executive Daniel Getts, Professor Durrant-Whyte noted Dr Getts' commercial prowess.

"He is the co-inventor on at least 100 patents in this area, so he really is a major entrepreneur in the area," he said.

Myeloid Therapeutics website says Dr Getts has more than 10 issued patents with more applications pending.

Australia's bureaucracy is excited about potential industry growth from patented medical technologies, and has diverted public resources away from critical shortages of basic products to fund them, while ignoring safety concerns with the mRNA platform.

More than 64,000 people have signed the Hope Accord calling for the mRNA covid shots to be banned on safety grounds, including more than 9000 medical doctors, academics and healthcare professionals.

The Sydney factory will produce plasmids for gene therapies and mRNA products, RNA strands, and lipid nanoparticles, Aurora said in a press release.

It will also offer a fill-finish service which provides the final formulations for clinical trials and commercial sales.

Dr Getts told the breakfast forum that RNA can be used for endless products and showed a slide with the potential uses including pesticides, biomanufacturing, biosensors, cosmetics and as tiny scaffolds for assembling complex materials.

Much of the anticipated industry growth is coming from medical trials.

Dr Getts said Australia was becoming a popular destination for clinical trials because the drug companies don't have to go to the TGA for approval, they go direct to the hospitals and doctors.

The TGA did not respond to requests, but its website says it does regulate the therapeutic goods used for clinical trials and subjects experimental medicines and biologics to inspections.

The research-funding arm of government, the NHMRC, says in its 2016 guidance that the TGA has the power to audit clinical trials or stop them where necessary on safety grounds.

The Sydney mRNA factory has gone up in record time: ground was first broken on the 4500 sqm site at Macquarie University in August. Full story here

By contrast, a critical shortage of IV drip bags and fluids has caused delays in surgery nation-wide since long before August, yet the crisis is still ongoing, because Australia cannot manufacture enough of these basic products here.

Securing drip bags is not a top priority for government - high-end mRNA factories are top priority, despite the ongoing safety scandal.

The $2 billion Moderna factory in Melbourne, now operational, has also been built extremely fast.

Oddly, mRNA factories are such a top priority that the Morrison Government's $2 billion deal with Moderna (now being audited) exempts Moderna's mRNA gene-vaccines from the usual rigorous assessment by the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee, The Guardian reported.

Australia spent more than $8 billion on mRNA gene-vaccines for covid that didn't work and resulted in more than 100,000 reports of injury and death to the TGA's Database of Adverse Event Notifications, with thousands more unreported.

Public money is now pouring into the RNA "ecosystem" which ties up public universities, government and Big Pharma.

The Sydney factory will be operated by a joint venture made up of Myeloid Therapeutics subsidiary Aurora Biosynthetics and RNA Australia.

RNA Australia is a joint venture company launched in September between the NSW Government and universities from NSW and ACT - tying academia in with the state.

Critics have asked why this niche technology should be a top priority for public spending at a time when there are critical shortages of basic necessities, especially when pandemics are exceedingly rare.

The last truly deadly pandemic was not covid (with its 0.07 percent infection fatality rate for unvaccinated under-70s) but the 1918 Spanish Flu more than a century ago - and most of those people died of secondary bacterial pneumonia because penicillin wasn't discovered until 1928.

One possible reason for the urgency is that royalty money expires.

Pharmaceutical patents only last 20 years from date of filing in the US and 25 years in Australia.

That means well-connected and influential mRNA patent-holders are keen to sell as much product that uses their patents as possible before it runs out.

Factories have to go up fast and pump product because the clock is ticking.

The amount of money is eye-watering: Pfizer and Moderna sold more than $183 billion worth of covid gene-vaccines by June 2023, as the Australian Financial Review reports.

New maladies for which mRNA will be recommended as a gene-vaccine include RSV, influenza, new strains of covid and anything else they can find, with a portion of the platform royalties flowing to Moderna.

Theft of the public purse

In his talk, Dr Getts said Aurora is a "capitalist" company: the profits are privatised for shareholders and patent-holders.

But the costs are paid by your taxes, which is not capitalist at all.

More than $200 million in public money has been poured into the Sydney mRNA factory, the NSW Government says, with $96 million for the plant plus another $119 million for RNA research.

Clients who pay to use the taxpayer-funded factory will get an additional tax rebate: 43 percent cash back on research and development expenditures, Australian Manufacturing reports.

Aurora Biosynthetics was launched in September this year, the same month as RNA Australia, for the purpose of operating this factory.

It is wholly owned by Myeloid, a US-based venture-capital-backed start-up co-founded in 2021 by Daniel Getts and Yuxiao Wang, whose names are on a bunch of patent applications including on methods and compositions for integrating transgenes into the genome of a cell.

Other co-founders include Ronald Vale, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Thomas Cahill, a managing partner of Newpath Partners which organised financing of the start-up, Myeloid said in its press release.

Letters From Australia emailed questions to both Myeloid Therapeutics and Aurora, but neither replied. The email to Aurora bounced back.

Letters From Australia sought comment from NSW Health Minister Ryan Park and from Chief Scientist Hugh Durrant-Whyte via email last week, asking why the state is pouring money into RNA when there is a critical shortage of essential medical supplies.

They ignored the requests.

Building an 'ecosystem'

The RNA Australia-Aurora joint venture seeks to develop an RNA "ecosystem" in the eastern states.

An "ecosystem" is a tangled web of seemingly independent businesses, NGOs, institutes, think-tanks, universities and other organisations that behave as a swarm or a pack, so that it's difficult to see the political agenda behind their creation.

It becomes a self-reinforcing policy whirlwind, a whole-of-society approach to political manipulation. It excludes critical voices from the news cycle by tying up all the key sectors, enabling money to be extracted from government more effectively.

This whole-of-society approach has been used by the US Deep State since 2016 to create "bottom-up authoritarianism" mimicking the autocratic power of Communist China, without the appearance of it coming from the top, according to former US State Department official Mike Benz.

Benz told the Joe Rogan podcast last week, that the US Deep State spends years building consensus between governments, corporations, banks, civil society groups, institutions, universities, activist groups, NGOs and the media to get what they want.

This consensus is now called "democracy", and anything that threatens it, including democratic elections, is a "threat to democracy", Benz said.

And what they want is mRNA for 100-day lab-to-jab platform vaccines, as CEPI says on its website.

Public-private partnerships: tying officials to commercial pressures

The Sydney mRNA factory is funded by the NSW State Government and will be operated by a public-private partnership between RNA Australia (which is the state's major universities plus the NSW Government), and Aurora Biosynthetics (owned by Myeloid Therapeutics).

A public-private partnership is a combine of business and state, which now also ties in academia.

This stitching-up of pillars of society that are supposed to be independent of each other ensures that they will cheer-lead for each other.

This removes independence, and silences the critical voices that, while annoying for industry, are a vital check and balance against reckless ideas and bad governance.

Public-Private Partnerships are an affront to a very important set of ethics that underpin good governance: the Nolan Principles.

These principles arose many years ago from the work of the UK Committee on Standards in Public Life (the Nolan Committee) and are applied in Australia as well as the UK.

They say that public office holders need to be accountable to the public, transparent and fair in their dealings and that they must discharge their duties in the interests of the public. They are there to serve the public, not industry and not the corporations.

The principles apply not just to elected officials but to anyone who delivers a public service such as those who work in health and in education, including universities.

Importantly, the second Nolan Principle of integrity is violated by public-private partnerships.

The British version states: "Holders of public office must avoid placing themselves under any obligation to people or organisations that might try inappropriately to influence them in their work. They should not act or take decisions in order to gain financial or other material benefits for themselves, their family, or their friends. They must declare and resolve any interests and relationships."

If you involve the state, the universities and industry together in a joint venture, it is impossible for the public office-holders in both the universities and the government to avoid being influenced by commercial pressures. They are officially tied to those commercial pressures.

For more on the Nolan Principles see Dr John Campbell's excellent video here.

Historically, public-private partnership had another name: "fascism". Unlike the corrupted definition you see on Wikipedia, "fascism" does not mean "ultranationalist" or "far right".

It means the merger of the state with other power centres: corporations, universities, media, culture. It is everything in the state and nothing outside the state - just as we saw with the US "consensus building" as described by Mike Benz.

It owes its name to the bundle of sticks, the fasces. One stick even a child can break easily - but a bundle of sticks not even the strongest man can break.

The bundle of sticks is all the powerful organs united.

Benito Mussolini, 1930s dictator of Italy, had the nation-state as the organising principle, saying: everything in the state and nothing outside the state.

"No individuals or groups (political parties, cultural associations, economic unions, social classes) outside the State," he wrote.

"The Fascist State organizes the nation, but it leaves the individual adequate elbow room. It has curtailed useless or harmful liberties while preserving those which are essential. In such matters the individual cannot be the judge, but the State only."

This appears to be a new, globalised form of "fascism". A fascism in which the nation-state itself is just one of the groups in the international consensus organised by powerful interests who seek control."