Australia's Chief Scientist, Prof Tony Haymet, delivered a speech at the Royal Australian Chemical Institute NSW Branch Fellows’ and Honorary Life Members’ luncheon on 2 May. 
 
I begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet today, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and pay my respects to their elders, past and present.

I also pay my respects to any First Nations people in the audience today.

And thanks, of course, to the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, who have been very kind to me in my career. I think I joined as an Honours student, could it be in 1877? No, probably it was 1977. It just seems like it was 125 years ago, and it’s been a wonderful thing. Thank you for all the help. 

I’ve been lucky enough to have been awarded the Masson Medal and Rennie Memorial Medal, but the one that I cherish, and I know all the awardees cherish, is the Distinguished Young Chemist Award from the Federation of Asian Chemical Societies, which came to me in 1997 when I was very far from being a young chemist, but it felt good to get an award with the word ‘young’ in it. 

I certainly commend you for your work and advocacy and I wish you well in your endeavour. 

I’d like to talk to you today about a date and a percentage. The date's very recent, Wednesday, December 4 2024. That was the day Moderna opened its mRNA manufacturing facility next to the Synchrotron, on the Monash University campus with support from the Australian and Victorian Governments. 

That was the first large-scale mRNA vaccine manufacturing facility not just in Australia, but also in the entire Southern Hemisphere, and we'll soon be able to produce up to 100 million doses of mRNA respiratory and pandemic vaccines a year, should we require them.

This facility of course complements the investments in RNA technology here in Sydney; Aurora Biosynthetics, BioNTech and Sanofi. As we chemists know only too well, the therapeutic and economic potential of RNA including mRNA vaccine technology, is vast.

It also took many decades to develop, which is probably not known to the general public. I think RNA was identified in the 1960s, and methods to deliver it into cells were developed in the 1970s. But mRNA introduced into cells degraded quickly, and it was not until lipid nanoparticles were perfected to surround that mRNA that useful applications were able to be developed.

Breakthroughs in 2005 led to the awarding eventually of the 2023 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. But we all know that's just chemistry anyway. The first effective mRNA vaccine, I understand was against Ebola, developed around 2010 by the Canadian Public Health Agency, NewLink Genetics, and then taken over by Merck in 2014.

But as always with diseases that are not big in the first world, it wasn't a great commercial success. But thank heavens for us, mRNA technology was ready for us in 2019 when we really needed it. And it's a fast proven technology for rapidly developing vaccines. It's just not appreciated by the broader community. How many decades of work of chemists and biochemists went into having that technology ready?

It's forecast that RNA technology will add up to 8 billion dollars to Australia's GDP by 2033. This is a truly significant milestone for Australia, and from my point of view, it represents a commitment, and a commitment that I sense across all possible governments who could be elected tomorrow, to do more things in Australia. To have sovereign capability. To stop giving up things that we do well. And it could be in any field: making cars, automobiles, liquid fuel, semiconductors, all the things that we've given away. We realise now we probably shouldn't have and we need sovereign capability in a lot of these areas and I think that's probably what I'm going to be spending a lot of the next three years doing. 

So, that was the date. The percentage is 93.76 percent, and that's the current vaccination rate for all five-year-old Australian children. Australia is or maybe used to be one of the preeminent vaccine success stories. In 1995, just 52 percent of one-year-olds were fully vaccinated.

By 2020, the vaccination rate for all five-year-olds was 95.09 percent. We'd also made quite considerable progress in narrowing the gaps between different parts of society, regions and communities. Although as you all know, there's more to be done. 

So it's been an extraordinary and rightly celebrated public health success, which is now at risk. Vaccination rates among Australian children have now declined for four consecutive years. Every single child vaccine on the national immunisation schedule, for each one of them, protection was lower in 2024 than it was in 2020. We've dropped from above 95 percent, where we were for quite a while, down to 93 percent and unfortunately there's no end in sight to this decline.

In 2018, there were only 10 communities in Australia where 10 percent or more of one-year-olds weren't vaccinated. Last year that number had increased to 50. It's not a uniquely Australian problem. Vaccination rates have declined in many high-income countries. Nor is the issue confined to children; vaccination rates in aged care, homes for illnesses like Covid-19 and for influenza are far lower than they ought to be.

Victoria is currently in the grips of its worst Measles outbreak for a decade. And I think you all know what's happening in Texas and Oklahoma and states like that.  So, from 95.09 percent to 93.76 percent doesn't sound like a huge difference, but these trends are very hard to reverse. And it took a lot of factors for us to drop below our former 95 percent fantastic success rate. 

Falling vaccination rates are more than just harbingers of increased disease in the community. They’re symptoms of a very different and yet virulent pandemic − the misinformation pandemic. 

People believing things that aren't true is not a new phenomenon. I keep thinking that the Balmain Tigers are going to come back and win the competition, probably not going to happen, even if we can get our proper name back. 

In terms of scale, reach, most transition, and significance, what we're seeing in Australia and other high-income countries is a horrible new phenomenon. One of the great privileges and responsibilities of my role as Australia's Chief Scientist is to be the Executive Officer of the National Science and Technology Council.

For those of you with long memories, that's the name we now have for what used to be called PMSEIC. And it's a body that I Chair when the Prime Minister and the Minister for Science are not available. That Council is responsible for providing advice to the Prime Minister and other ministers on important science and technology-related issues facing Australia.

The Council has almost completed preparing a report on information resilience. The work is ongoing and confidential; it hasn't been signed off by the minister of the day. It probably won't be for a few weeks, whoever that minister is, but I do want to share with you a couple of findings from that report that I think are important and relevant to you. 

It turns out a lot of us think that children are the ones that are susceptible to misinformation. And it turns out, they're quite resilient. They've lived their whole lives with being bombarded with misinformation. It's more people like you and me and our colleagues who have a bit more time on their hands that are susceptible to going down rabbit holes of misinformation. Hopefully not chemists but others, maybe without the scientific background. We all, as scientists and chemists, have a responsibility to try and counter this insidious movement in our society.

The NSTC report, when published, I hope you'll see the discussion the role of cultural and community institutions and structures that help us build and share identities and realities. We don't often think of places such as art galleries, libraries, archives and museum as bulwarks against misinformation, but they are, and perhaps we are too, as academics and chemists and scientists.

I think we all have a responsibility to combat misinformation. And I think it's all part of our jobs to be science communicators as well as practitioners in what we do. The people who spread misinformation, I've learnt from this report, don't necessarily do so for malignant reasons. They may act on genuine, although mistaken, beliefs.

And as the research shows, it's very difficult to persuade someone of something when they believe the opposite. Misinformation weakens the body politic and it makes some of the most important tasks in society – running a government, keeping people healthy, living together harmoniously – makes it significantly more difficult. Declining vaccination rates show many Australians are struggling to comprehend an increasingly complex world and losing trust in some institutions as a result. 

Of course, any honest account would also acknowledge that sometimes, those institutions have got it wrong. Not every government and not every public health expert got everything right during the Covid-19 pandemic. But I think we did pretty well, I for one don't think we have to claim that we’re 100 successful when we're responding in emergency situations.

I think in too many places, experiences of slight lack of perfection, have forced we scientists into defensive postures. We explain only to rebut. In my term as Australia's Chief Scientist and a science communicator, I hope to embrace a different position. A different posture. I want to help explain the incredible advances that are being made in our field and other scientific disciplines.

I want to talk about the extraordinary technology and decades of work behind mRNA vaccines. Or the equally exciting fact that we are manufacturing doses right here in Australia and delivering a boost to not only our health, but our economy. 

You may have read that overseas, one of the governments in North America is planning to cancel a very large grant to to work on mRNA vaccines for bird flu. Australia, with its new laboratory, is one of the two or three nations in the world capable of taking up that work and certainly we're working very hard to bring that project to Australia, if in fact it's not proceeding in North America.

So to explain to our community the great good that chemists and scientists do, I'm going to need help from each one of you. They say that every speech should end with a call for action, so, this is my plea to you − I want you to be a science communicator. To advocate for the beauty and truth of what we do – of the scientific method, vaccine, scientific institutions, and public good. 

I hope each of you will ask yourselves ‘what tools do I have at my disposal to convince and persuade?’ It might go no further than sharing a social media post or plucking up the courage to challenge one of your opinionated relatives or children at a social event, but even that turns out to be important.

Misinformation is pernicious, but it's not inevitable. So join with me. We'll counter it. 

Thank you very much.