A leading medical specialist and long COVID patients say the chief medical officer (CMO) downplayed the state of long COVID in Australia while justifying the end of national isolation requirements.
Steven Faux, who heads up a long COVID clinic at a Sydney hospital, called the comments "unusual" and akin to "pulling the sheet over your head".
During a press conference last month, when the October 14 mandatory isolation end date was announced, Paul Kelly said health authorities were still assessing the extent of long COVID in Australia.
"We're not seeing a major picture of long COVID," he said.
"For the majority of Australians, we were not exposed to COVID before we had at least two vaccines.
"We know that the major risk factors for long COVID are having had infection before vaccination, being unvaccinated, having severe illness and having other types of COVID that were not Omicron."
Professor Faux, who co-directs the long COVID clinic at St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney, said Professor Kelly's comments did not accurately represent the patients who were presenting at his practice.
"Mostly we're seeing people who got [COVID-19] in December and that's the Omicron wave … and the majority we are seeing are vaccinated," Professor Faux said.
Long COVID still a risk
The rehabilitation and pain physician pointed to international research that showed those who were triple vaccinated and infected with Omicron had a long COVID rate of 5 per cent.
"That's not a major problem, unless you consider that over 10 million Australians have had COVID," he said.
"That's not insubstantial when you consider that the public health services are at maximum capacity."
The St Vincent's clinic has been inundated with hundreds of people seeking help, with some specialists booked out until the middle of next year.
"We've been getting phone calls from Victoria, the Northern Territory, South Australia and Queensland about people wanting to come down and we've been sending them back," Professor Faux said.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Aged Care told the ABC that Professor Kelly's comments were based on research conducted overseas and stressed that people who were vaccinated were less likely to develop symptoms of long COVID.
"In addition, studies have shown that infection with the Omicron variant is less likely to lead to symptoms of long COVID than infection with the Delta variant."
Comments not based on data, say advocates
The CMO's comments have been met with sadness and anger by long COVID advocates, who say patients like them are not being seen or heard.
"He has no data on which to base those claims," academic Pippa Yeoman said.
"He's making a political statement about how clever they were to close the borders and get everybody vaccinated and saying that means we will be different [to other countries]. If you make a claim, you need to be able to back it up."
Dr Yeoman is a member of the Australia Long Covid Community Facebook group, which has about 2,600 members.
The group has been collecting survey data on its members in a bid to present the information to an approaching parliamentary Inquiry into Long COVID and Repeated COVID Infections.
Members said their preliminary data analysis of almost 300 survey respondents showed that the vast majority were double vaccinated before developing long COVID and were infected during the Omicron wave.
There is no official national data on the number of people with long COVID in Australia and not every state has a dedicated long COVID clinic, making it difficult to quantify the number of people with the condition or the impact it has on their lives.
The Department of Health and Aged Care said analysis of health data had begun in order to help develop a national response to long COVID.
"The Department is also working with states and territories to better understand the prevalence of long COVID in Australia," it said.
Calls for national plan
However, Dr Yeoman said the government was not adequately informing Australians of the risks.
"A sensible person who trusts the government thinks that long COVID is not within the realm of possibility for them," she said.
"If I was a person who knew that if I got sick, I had a 5 per cent chance of having something pretty horrible, I might weigh that up in whether I get on a train without a mask."
Professor Faux spoke of a need for a national plan and welcomed the parliamentary inquiry, however, he estimated it would take between nine months and a year for resources to be rolled out as a result of any recommendations.
"We saved ourselves early on [in the pandemic] by planning very aggressively," he said.
"Now, we come into the back end of this and there is a tail to this disease, but the planning for it is glacial in its speed. So, why is that?
"Does that mean disabled people and disability are less important than able-bodied people?"
