Covid-19

Baroness Altmann Excerpts

Wednesday 21st July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con) [V]]

My Lords, this is the clinical advice given to us by clinicians. I cannot answer the whole question in the round in this brief session, but a number of considerations include not only that vaccines offer a significantly reduced rate of infection but that the level of infection is much lower, the viral load is much lower, and therefore the infectiousness is much lower. The aggregate effect is that a group of people who have been vaccinated, with a few who have the disease, is less infectious than a group of people who have been tested, however good the test.

[Baroness Altmann (Con)]

My Lords, I echo the words of appreciation for my noble friends Lady Penn and Lord Bethell and congratulate them on all the work they have been doing. I also want wholeheartedly to support the aims of the policy that we have now, with so-called freedom. Indeed, I encourage the Government to consider going even further. This is about managing risk, not just of Covid but of all other illnesses, so I have to ask, having listened to this debate, when will be the right time? If all the most vulnerable and two-thirds of all adults are vaccinated, and if the mass numbers of infections do not lead to mass hospitalisations and deaths, and if zero Covid is unachievable, when will we learn to live with the virus and stop government interference with individual citizens’ lives in the way that has been, in my view, so frightening over the last period?

[Lord Bethell (Con) [V]]

I am grateful for my noble friend’s kind remarks. Her question is extremely complex, and difficult to answer briefly but I will rest on one particular answer. As I said before, this is a question of getting the disease transmission to a point where R is below one. If that can be done on a national basis, we have contained the disease. We can then turn to local outbreak management. That is when test and trace resources will come into their own and local deployment will make a big difference. That is when we can consider the virus to have been beaten. We are not quite there yet, but vaccination rates are incredibly impressive and I am hopeful that we are near to that point.