What we know today, Thursday March 24
Pharmaceutical giant Moderna will establish an Asia Pacific hub in Australia for the manufacture of mRNA vaccines as part of a multi-billion dollar agreement with the Federal Government.
- Moderna to establish vaccine hub in Australia
- Brock tipped for shock cabinet comeback
- SA COVID cases climb as BA.2 takes over
- Man jailed for minimum 26 years over Suzanne Poll murder
- Black box recovered in China plane crash
- First female US secretary of state Madeleine Albright dies
- Aussies skittle Pakistan in stunning batting collapse
Moderna to establish vaccine hub in Australia
Pharmaceutical giant Moderna will establish an Asia Pacific hub in Australia for the manufacture of mRNA vaccines as part of a multi-billion dollar agreement with the Federal Government.
The announcement comes as the country’s leading vaccine advisory group is set to hand down its advice on whether a fourth dose will be needed for vulnerable people.
The research and development hub will be based in Victoria at a location yet to be decided and serve as the headquarters for the company’s operations in Australia, Southeast Asia and Oceania.
The hub will be the first of its type in the southern hemisphere with about 100 million mRNA vaccines produced annually.
Construction will begin by the end of the year and production is expected to start at the site from 2024.
While the facility will manufacture COVID-19 vaccines, it will also focus on other respiratory illnesses, including seasonal flu and respiratory syncytial virus.
The manufacturing hub is expected to produce about 100 million mRNA vaccines annually.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison called the facility a “shot in the arm” to help protect Australians from future pandemics.
“What we’re announcing today is absolutely essential for future pandemic preparedness, and we’re already ranked number two in the world on pandemic preparedness,” he told reporters in Melbourne.
Health Minister Greg Hunt said the facility could potentially produce a combined COVID-19 and flu vaccine.
“Moderna has looked around the world and they partnered with Australia, and we have partnered with them,” he said.
“mRNA isn’t just about COVID, it isn’t just about vaccines, it’s also about the precision medicines of the future so we can literally tailor the treatments for individuals over the course of the next decade.”
Hunt said he expected to receive advice from the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation today.
It is expected the advice will recommend a fourth dose of a COVID-19 vaccine for people aged over 65, as well as people who are immunocompromised.
Brock tipped for shock cabinet comeback
Political giant-slayer Geoff Brock is poised to make a shock cabinet comeback when Premier Peter Malinauskas’s ministry is sworn in this morning.
The Labor caucus yesterday elected 14 of the party’s MPs to hold frontbench roles, with federal defector Nick Champion entering state parliament as a minister – as InDaily exclusively revealed yesterday.
He is the major Labor change from the former shadow ministry, replacing Lee Odenwalder who will take the role of government whip.
Left-winger and former union boss Joe Szakacs also enters the ministry, after serving as a shadow minister in Opposition.
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He’ll take the cabinet spot of the Right’s Emily Bourke, who will be an assistant minister, alongside fledgling MP Rhiannon Pearce, who enters parliament having snared the north-eastern suburbs marginal of King from the Liberals.
But a shock development appears on the cards – with independent Geoff Brock, who defeated Deputy Premier Dan van Holst Pellekaan in his Stuart stronghold, strongly tipped to return to the ministry, having served in the former Weatherill Government.
Brock’s support allowed then-Premier Jay Weatherill to return to power as a minority government in 2014.
His prospective return to the ministry would give the new Malinauskas administration significant regional heft, and shore up parliamentary support – although the numbers in the House suggests it will not be needed.
But Government figures were coy about the prospect of Brock joining the ministry last night, with one telling InDaily: “All will be revealed tomorrow.”
Brock himself last night declined to comment as to whether he would return to a frontbench role.
Malinauskas’s full cabinet will be sworn in at Government House today around 10am.
– Tom Richardson
SA COVID cases climb as BA.2 takes over
South Australia has recorded its third-highest daily case number during the pandemic, with the new BA.2 subvariant of Omicron accounting for around 70 per cent of cases, according to SA Health.
The state recorded 4594 cases on Wednesday, up from 3686 infections on Tuesday and two deaths, with the number of people in hospital with the virus slightly decreasing to 161.
There are more than 27,000 active cases across the state and 236 COVID-related deaths since South Australia opened its borders on November 23 last year.
Wednesday’s case number was the third-highest since the pandemic began, only behind the 4685 recorded on January 19 and 5679 on January 14.
COVID-19’s impact on the state’s schools is also becoming more stark, with 740 teachers and school service officers currently absent due to COVID-19 reasons – up from 697 yesterday.
The state’s student absentee rate due to COVID-19 has also grown from 3.1 per cent to 3.4.
South Australia’s COVID-19 cases are expected to peak at around 8000 cases a day next month with adult ward occupancy reaching more than 200 beds, according to State Government-commissioned modelling from the University of Adelaide.
Chief public health officer Nicola Spurrier said health authorities were not worried about the number of cases but rather the impact it would have on the functioning of the healthcare system.
“What we are concerned about is our hospitalisations and for a long time over the pandemic things in hospitals have needed to change,” she told ABC Radio this morning.
“We really want to make sure that we can manage our health system optimally so that everything we normally do in health can continue.
“It’s acceptable for a period of time if we’ve got a big wave and we need to do things at the point of a surge, but we know that we’re going to get continuing waves of this.
“We need to have a system that’s robust so people can get that normal healthcare over a period of time.”
Spurrier also emphasised “the other states are experiencing a BA.2 surge as well” as case numbers soar across the country.
The newly elected Malinauskas Government will scrutinise the state’s COVID-19 restrictions tomorrow.
Man jailed for minimum 26 years over Suzanne Poll murder
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A man found guilty over the cold-case murder of Suzanne Poll in Adelaide’s north has been jailed for at least 26 years.
Matthew Donald Tilley was arrested in Victoria in 2019 after a DNA match from a discarded coffee cup linked him to the killing of Poll in a Salisbury stationery shop in 1993.
On Wednesday, he appeared in the South Australian Supreme Court, where Justice David Peek set the non-parole period.
He had previously imposed the mandatory head sentence of life in prison.
“While any murder of any citizen constitutes the commission of a most serious offence known to our law, the circumstances of the present crime call for clear denunciation,” Justice Peek said in his sentencing remarks.
“This killing of a female shop employee, alone on duty at night, followed by a successful escape and subsequent non-detection inevitably led to great publicity in South Australia and concomitant concern, indeed fear, in the community.”
Poll, 36, was found in a pool of blood in the rear of a stationery store where she worked.
She had suffered at least 18 stab wounds, including some that went right through her body.
At the start of Tilley’s trial in November last year, prosecutor Carmen Matteo said improvements in DNA techniques ultimately resulted in the 49-year-old’s arrest.
She said a DNA profile originally extracted from a man’s blood at the murder scene returned a familial match with Tilley’s brother in late 2017.
That led detectives to travel to Victoria to question the accused and after noticing him discard a disposable coffee cup, they retrieved it and brought it back to Adelaide for testing, ultimately securing the DNA match.
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Black box recovered in China plane crash
Chinese emergency workers have found one of the two black boxes from a China Eastern Airlines plane that crashed this week with 132 people on board, as the United States confirms its investigators have been invited to the crash site.
Based on an early assessment, the black box device recovered is the plane’s cockpit voice recorder, according to the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), which said the recording material appeared to have survived impact in relatively good shape.
Flight MU5735 was en-route from the southwestern city of Kunming to Guangzhou on the coast on Monday when the Boeing 737-800 jet suddenly plunged from cruising altitude at about the time when it should have started its descent before landing.
The cause of the crash has yet to be determined.
Most of the jet appears to have disintegrated upon impact although some debris and human remains have been found.
“An initial inspection showed that the exterior of the recorder has been severely damaged but the storage units, while also damaged to some extent, are relatively complete,” CAAC official Zhu Tao said.
The black box is being sent to an institute in Beijing for decoding although how long that takes would depend on the extent of the damage, Zhu said.
Weather along the flight path on Monday did not pose any danger to the aircraft and air controllers had communication with it after take-off and prior to its rapid descent, said Mao Yanfeng, head of aircraft investigation at CAAC.
US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said on Wednesday that Chinese authorities had invited the US National Transportation Safety Board to take part in the investigation of the crash, adding that he was very encouraged by the invitation to be on the ground in China.
First female US secretary of state Madeleine Albright dies
Madeleine Albright, who fled the Nazis as a child in her native Czechoslovakia during World War II but rose to become the first female US secretary of state, has died at the age of 84.
Albright was a tough-talking diplomat in an administration that hesitated to involve itself in the two biggest foreign policy crises of the 1990s – the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
“We are heartbroken to announce that Dr Madeleine K Albright, the 64th US Secretary of State and the first woman to hold that position, passed away earlier today. The cause was cancer,” the family said on Twitter.
Albright, who was born in the former Czechoslovakia in 1937, was nominated to become the first woman secretary of state, and confirmed unanimously in 1997.
She was in the post until 2001.
After becoming the US ambassador to the United Nations in 1993, she had pressed for a tougher line against Serb forces in Bosnia.
Albright’s experience as a refugee prompted her to push for the US to be a superpower that used that clout. She wanted a “muscular internationalism,” said James O’Brien, a senior adviser to Albright during the Bosnian war.
She once upset a Pentagon chief by asking why the military maintained more than one million men and women under arms if they never used them.
During efforts to press North Korea to end its nuclear weapons program, which was eventually unsuccessful, Albright travelled to Pyongyang in 2000 to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, becoming the highest-ranking US official at the time to visit the secretive country.
Once the Clinton years and the 1990s were over, Albright became an icon to a generation of young women looking for inspiration in their quest for opportunity and respect in the workplace.
Albright was fond of saying: “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.”
Aussies skittle Pakistan in stunning batting collapse
Pat Cummins and Mitchell Starc have extracted life out of another flat pitch to demolish Pakistan with a reverse swing masterclass, putting Australia in a position to claim a historic victory in the deciding third Test.
Australia’s first tour of Pakistan in 24 years has been tough going for the bowlers but Cummins (5-56) and Starc (4-33) were finally rewarded for toiling away by routing the home team in a dramatic final hour on day three.
"Things you love to see: pic.twitter.com/5vdxoWZix0"
"— cricket.com.au (@cricketcomau) March 23, 2022"
With Pakistan seemingly crawling towards a third-straight draw at 3-248 on Wednesday, Australia’s quicks produced a reverse swing exhibition.
Pakistan lost 7-20 in a sudden collapse to crumble to 268 all out and hand Australia a first-innings lead of 123.
Openers Usman Khawaja and David Warner were sent out for three overs before stumps but survived with Australia 0-11 at the end of play.
Australia took just four wickets in the opening Test at Rawalpindi and Pakistan batted for 172 overs to save the second match in Karachi.
But it was finally the bowlers’ turn to shine as Cummins finished with the seventh five-wicket haul of his career as Starc claimed four of the other five.
“I don’t think this wicket helps the fast bowlers at all,” Starc said.
“The wicket started out quite slow and dead and we’ve seen it shoot lower and lower as the days have gone on.
“The key is reverse swing and both teams have used that well.
“We’ve got to stay patient, it’s a hard slog, and things are going to happen quicker as the game goes on.”
All of Starc’s four wickets came by attacking the stumps – three bowled and one lbw – while two of Cummins’ victims were clean-bowled.
"Cummins gets his third wicket of the innings! Really well deserved from the Aussie captain #PAKvAUS pic.twitter.com/sS1EJz3AWw"
"— cricket.com.au (@cricketcomau) March 23, 2022"
Arguably, Cummins’ most important wicket came during the grind of the second session as he hung onto a difficult catch off his own bowling to dismiss the resilient Azhar Ali for 78.
Australia has recorded just three Test victories in Pakistan dating back to 1957, with two of those coming in 1959.
– With AAP and Reuters
