Teenager Levi,16, died of Meningococcal B sepsis at 7.40am on September 24 – just hours after he first became unwell. His grieving mum Norliah said Levi fell ill with what appeared to be gastro-like symptoms the night before, and his condition deteriorated rapidly. “It went through his body like wildfire,” Norliah said. Levi, who was a Year 10 student at St Francis Xavier College in Beaconsfield, appeared perfectly happy and healthy in the morning, Norliah said.

He came home from a day working with his uncle as a removalist, complaining of a stiff neck. “He was in the truck, and he said he fell asleep, and that’s not unusual to get a stiff neck if you’re lying weirdly in a truck,” Norliah said. Norliah said she gave him some water and ran him a bath but was perturbed that Levi didn’t want to eat anything. “He eats like 10,000 meals a day, so that was unusual,” she said.

Levi told his mother that he felt nauseous, so she gave him a bucket, and he went to bed. “At 1.30am we woke to hear him vomiting in the bathroom, and found him in there delirious,” Norliah said. “The delirium was what really alarmed me, and I called the paramedics.”

The paramedics rushed him to the intensive care unit at Monash Children’s Hospital. “He went straight into the ICU unit,” Norliah said. “There were probably 40 medical professionals in there working on him. It was full on, like something out of a nightmare movie.”

In ICU, Levi developed purple spots all over his skin, and then – just hours after his first symptoms – his heart stopped. “He was my sidekick, he was my little buddy, we did everything together; he was a gorgeous, loving, funny boy,” Norliah said. “There’s a whole community around me who are grieving.”

Norliah thought when Levi had had his Meningococcal ACWY vaccine earlier in Year 10 she had done everything she could to protect him. “As far as I knew, I’d done the best by him. Tick, done that job,” she said.

But Norliah didn’t know there was another vaccine that could’ve protected Levi against Menigococcal B – the strain that killed him. “If I had known there was a deadly Men B strain out there that could’ve taken my son’s life, I wouldn’t have hesitated to protect him,” she said.

The Men B vaccine is freely available to babies and teens in South Australia, Northern Territory and Queensland – but not in Victoria where Levi lived.

“It makes me angry that three other states protect their kids, but Victoria and the others don’t,” Norliah said. “If Levi lived in another state, then he could still be alive.

“Not including the Men B vaccine free and not letting us know about it is almost sneaky. They put it down to we don’t have enough numbers to make it worthwhile. The message is it doesn’t matter to them.

“We’re not America, we don’t have that many states, so how can it be so inconsistent across Australia? States like Victoria say they have no plans to include it. Are they planning for people to die? If it happened to any of their kids, would they be worried then? How can they say it doesn’t matter for a certain number of kids to die of this each year? It’s heartless.”