Retiring Health secretary Brendan Murphy says Australia better prepared for another pandemic after COVID

Professor Brendan Murphy retired on Thursday, two months after the World Health Organisation declared COVID was no longer a global health emergency.

When asked about the kind of pandemic Australia may face in the future, the outgoing health secretary said it was difficult to guess but the "highest risk area probably still is influenza".

"The biggest anxiety is probably bird flu, which has been around for a long time and every now and again, we get humans infected, but we haven't seen sustained human-to-human transmission," he said.

"The big worry is that one day one of those viruses will mutate and start to transmit from human to human.

"I think COVID has shown us you just can't predict these things, you've got to be prepared for all eventualities."

But he said both the Health Department and the nation are now much more prepared for another pandemic, with onshore vaccine manufacturing facilities under construction, quarantine experience and a stronger medical stockpile. He expects Australia to be even better prepared when the centre for disease control gets up and running.

Professor Murphy's career in the health sector spans more than four decades.

He served as the head of nephrology at St Vincent's Hospital and chief executive of Austin Health in Victoria before joining the department of health as chief medical officer in 2016.

In June of 2020, he stepped into the Health secretary job, shoring up his legacy of leading the country through the first global pandemic in a century.

Reflecting on the handling the pandemic, Professor Murphy said "there's nothing that stands out" as his biggest regret.

But the retiring health secretary cited the aged care COVID-19 outbreaks in Victoria as the "most distressing" time.

"We tried very hard to protect aged care, to prepare aged care but, for a range of reasons, the size of the Victorian outbreak that was the worst time for me," he told The Canberra Times.

"You have to do a lot of things just to stop that happening. I'm not sure that it was preventable once the virus got out in Victoria at the time."

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On the whole, Professor Murphy said "there's always things you could do better".

In his valedictory address last week, the outgoing top health official said he had committed to taking part in the anticipated government review of the national pandemic response and didn't want to preempt it with a "detailed critique about performance".

But he said most would say "that on balance, Australia did pretty well compared to other similar high income countries".

Reflecting on lockdowns, he said the measure "did effectively stop transmission" during the large scale outbreak in Victoria in 2020 but "some of the other later lockdowns in other jurisdictions are worthy of analysis".

Asked about vaccine delivery, Professor Murphy told The Canberra Times they procured as many doses as they could "with an early delivery date".

The government came under fire for failing to secure enough vaccine doses early on and significant delays in the rollout. An audit report later found Health's administration of vaccines to both priority groups and the general population did not meet targets, with residential aged care and residential disability rollouts being "slower than planned".

"One of the challenges with the mRNA vaccines is that, certainly in the case of Moderna, none of it left the US until they had all they needed," Professor Murphy said.

"Had we been able to order more mRNA vaccines earlier like Japan did, they might not have come any earlier."

Professor Murphy said there were "big curveballs" with the University of Queensland vaccine, which returned a false positive result, and AstraZeneca.

"I'm sure that people will say one could do this a little bit better than the other but the biggest surprise was the AstraZeneca clotting issue. If that hadn't happened, we would have had plentiful vaccines at the right time.

"It was only a relatively brief period, where we were short and we didn't have enough vaccines as we could potentially put in arms."

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To manage the pandemic response, Professor Murphy said the health department brought in a "whole lot of people from outside", including other staff from other APS departments, contractors, epidemiologists and technical experts.

Professor Murphy said it employed nearly 1000 COVID response staff during its peak.

"People wanted to come and do it because there was a huge sense of purpose, and we saw our staff engagement go up massively during COVID," he said.

When asked about the former prime minister's secret appointment to the Health portfolio, Professor Murphy said he was aware Scott Morrison was planning on the appointment but that "didn't seem particularly unusual at the time in the height of the pandemic".

"It was something that happened in the background," he said.

"Those powers, as far as I'm aware, certainly weren't used in health."

Professor Murphy stepped down from the health secretary role on Thursday but said he wasn't planning on clocking off completely.

"I might do some board work or some project work but I'm not making any decisions about that until I've had a bit of downtime and relaxed a bit," he said.

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