THE Turnbull Government is preparing to dump the booster dose of the whooping cough vaccine given to children in the first year of high school as rates of the disease nearly double.

Also it has announced it will ditch the proposed $26 million school vaccination register that would have helped control disease outbreaks.

The removal of the vaccine booster comes even though US and Australian studies show the effectiveness of the new acellular whopping cough vaccines wears off quickly with only three or four out of 10 people fully protected four years after vaccination.

The number of whooping cough cases has almost doubled in the last four years with 14,392 cases recorded in the year to date.

The announcement follows News Corp Australia’s revelation on Sunday that the register would not be ready for the 2017 school year because the tender process had not been finalised.

The School Vaccination Register was announced as a key part of the government’s No Jab No Play immunisation strategy in the 2015 budget.

While parents of young children are prompted to vaccinate their children by the withholding of childcare payments there is no way of checking the vaccination status of older schoolchildren.

The new register will be vital in controlling infectious disease outbreaks because it will identify areas where vaccine coverage is low allowing health services to target vaccine delivery.

“Further work is required to increase the national childhood vaccination rate so that it is high enough to meet ‘herd immunity’ for most vaccine preventable diseases,” Health Minister Sussan Ley said when she announced the new register in May 2015.

In a statement issued today the Department of Health says “new advice has been received which has caused it to reconsider the need for a specific and expanded Australian Schools Vaccination Register”.

Opposition health spokeswoman Catherine King said the Minister’s own health department said that the register was important to improve vaccination rates – “now they are dumping it only two months before it was due to start”.

“This Register would have provided critical information needed to improve vaccination rates in young people,” Ms King said.

“It is appalling that the Government thinks they can get away with quietly scrapping it on a Friday afternoon – parents and the community are owed a clear explanation of how the Government will improve vaccination rates without this important data,” she added.

The government also revealed in the statement that it is planning to remove the whooping cough booster currently given to teenagers.

The Department says it has asked the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) “to provide advice on the clinical place and effectiveness of the pertussis vaccine schedule, including the pertussis booster currently given in the first year of high school”.

A catch up program for the chickenpox vaccine is due to end in 2018 so the only vaccine that would be captured in the register was the cervical cancer vaccine, the government says.

It is considering instead simply extending the current cervical cancer vaccine register.

In the same budget the government provided funding for The Australian Immunisation Register which commenced on 30 September 2016.

This register collects data on all National Immunisation Program and many private vaccines for people of all ages, although not school vaccines.

Other immunisation activities funded from the $26 million allocation included incentive payments to vaccination providers to catch up children overdue for vaccinations and communications activities to provide parents with evidence based information about immunisation

“If the adolescent pertussis booster is removed from the National Immunisation Program schedule it is possible that the Schools Register will gather data on HPV vaccinations only, which is currently the case,” the Department says.

Australian Medical Association president Dr Michael Gannon said he would be concerned if the changes do anything to reduce the effort to maximise childhood vaccination rates.

“I would hope that any changes to the Year 7 vaccination was evidence based, “ he said.

“There is more and more concern over time about how effective the acellular vaccine is over a period of time, we know it does become worse over time” he said.

At least 166,000 children were recorded as being more than two months overdue for their vaccinations in 2014.