Table 1.

Selected quotes on the engagement of Australian veterinarians within the public health response to COVID-19.

Supporting state and federal health department functions
Motivations for engaging	‘Recruitment calls went out, and all the organisations that had close ties to the department and have collaborated in the past. Heads were approached to provide some of their staff which was wonderful and gave us a huge sort of surge workforce.This is such a unique opportunity.It's been that feeling of:this as an emergency response, we want to help our state and our country, however we can.’ (V16) ‘I think it's a bit cool as a vet to be able to work for the[Department of Health and Human Services].You know, I've always been very, very much a fan of One Health.It seemed like a very good opportunity to jump onto the other, the human side of things and see how that was working. And yeah, sort of see both sides.’ (V31)
Recognition of skills	‘I think there was a recognition that our staff are used to dealing with population level health pandemic type scenarios and had some skills to offer.’ (V21) ‘I think it was preparedness.Because one thing NSW has, well, [Department of Primary Industries] has done a lot, is emergency management. And the interactions that occur during emergency management and drought. COVID is just another way of […] addressing that, using that system that has been in place. Which means pulling in a lot of key players to actually address the problems.’ (V33)
Transition to human health response	‘My attitude was not to try and solve problems. When I was providing advice or commentary on something, I'd be very clear to say, ‘Well, I'm coming at this really differently from you. And so, you know, this may be totally wrong, butthis isthe way I think about this.’ And I think, to some extent some of the ways that we think about population health, about international trade are really quite different. And hopefully, some of those things, some of those approaches were quite useful.’ (V12) ‘Most of the modelling work I did for the department was a multi-level model. So, we're talking about simulation of spread between and within households that parallel identically to spread within and between farms. Soa lot of what we worked on had analogues in veterinary epidemiology. Now, we didn't commonly say that, because sometimes we found that led to people not being as engaged, so better to keep that to ourselves.’ (V35)
Acceptance by the public health workforce	‘I guess it's a really interesting case study of veterinary public health and One Health in action because there's a number of veterinarians involved in the National IncidentRoom, as well as people involved in food safety epidemiology, people from academic roles in epidemiology.It's pretty amazing, really, to think that people could come from across the public sector and academia and work together.’(V12) ‘I say yes, there are challenges in that space. There is a mutual respect issue that I think will not go away. In a lot of senses, we've gained a lot of respect through this outbreak and that's for the benefit of our further One Health work together. Butin other respects there isn't an equal acceptance of our skills and advice because we aren't specifically from the public health or medical domain.’ (V35)
Supporting laboratory and research functions
Boosting laboratory capacity	‘We were very well prepared for high throughput testing for an animal outbreak. And we just used our utterly routine extraction and PCR methods for the COVID-19 testing.That's the beauty of what the laboratory brings is that we are operating in this disease space all the time.And the big achievement I think, which hasn't been sung about, is making the virus transport media. Sowe've made over half a million vials of virus transport media, which doesn't contain nucleases unlike a lot of the commercial virus transport media.So it's more effective than some of the commercially available transport media. So, we supply about half the state's transport media needs’ (V28)
Overseeing animal research	‘We've got really large groups of animals, larger than we ordinarily would, because everything's been runat once.We were running three groups at a time so we can generate the data more quickly.A lot of our work is looking at just stopping your lungs consuming themselves.I guess feeling that I'm involved in some tiny way in facilitating research that will have an impact is really rewarding. But it's also,there's that urgency that we need to do this, we need to do as fast as possible, do it properly.’ (V29)
Supporting the international response
Capacity building	‘And in a number of those projects, we have beenrequested to provide what technical assistance we can to COVID responses for a number of countries,predominantly Indonesia, in ramping up their COVID testing and some of their COVID responses in terms of sequencing bioinformatics. And also, we've been setting up an advisory group to help them with some vaccine platform development.It's not just for this COVID, but so that platform is ready for vaccine development for a future pandemic or a future occurrence.’ (V32)
Pivoting existing overseas investments	‘So where current projects were able to value add to the responses in various countries of the region, [vets were amongst those who provided] some technical assessment of those submissions. If you've got limited resources what do you prioritize fast? What's really practical? Like, training in administering supplementary oxygen is going to be more important than ventilators for some countries.’ (V05)