I was wondering why this package was so outdated but still in Debian. I am adding this information here so it saves time to others wondering the same.
After some research I found the current listed maintainer had in fact indicated the package was being orphaned in August 2015: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=797535 This report indicates progress to have an updated version in Buster was going well while proposing it in Debian Multimedia repositories, but I believe being past freeze this is not possible. Reading through that report and looking at https://repology.org/metapackage/vmpk/versions the Debian Multimedia repository does have the latest version. That may be an option for end-users until work resumes/is finished.
