Australia’s highest profile medical professional, Dr Brendan Murphy, pictured, says he doubts that Australia’s international borders will reopen this year.
Dr Murphy acknowledged ABC News Breakfast yesterday it was a “big question” and that “I think that the answer is probably no.
“I think that we’ll go most of this year with still substantial border restrictions, even if we have a lot of the population vaccinated. We don’t know whether that will prevent transmission of the virus.”
He also cautioned that the volatility of the Covid pandemic mages forecasting difficult, telling interviewers that the rule book has been made up as we go”.
“I don’t want to predict more than two or three months ahead,” he said.
“The world is changing. I think at the moment, we’ve got this light at the end of the tunnel – the vaccine – so we’re going to go as safely and as fast as we can to get our population vaccinated and then we’ll look at what happens.”