Vaccinations and Health Screening Services

Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone Excerpts

Tuesday 14th May 2019 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone (Con)]

My Lords, let me be the first to pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, for introducing this important debate. I also pay tribute to her expert knowledge in this field, given all that she has said.

For some of us, what has happened with immunisation and vaccination is a mystery. I am looking at the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, who was a Minister shortly after I was. One of the great battles that my then boss, Kenneth Clarke, had was with the GPs on introducing the new contract after 1987. It was about incentivising GPs to increase child immunisation and cervical cancer screening. There was a great hullabaloo that they were motivated only by feeling for their wallets, or whatever the expression was at the time. The fact is that there was a rapid increase in child immunisation and cervical cancer screening. I remember being summoned by the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, to a meeting of Finchley GPs in the Prime Minister’s room behind the Speaker’s Chair in another place. They all gave their views on the programme and whether they had been coerced into following the cervical cancer rulings, and so forth. Whatever was said, it did the job.

Nearly all of us in this Room, who are working women, know that our lives and our families’ lives have been freed from all those infant diseases that held back women at home for so many years. Vaccinations are an extraordinary success story. They have an amazing ability to leave people free from disease if a sufficient number create herd immunity. Smallpox is the only infectious disease to be eradicated completely among humans through deliberate intervention; it was wiped out through a global programme. In 1988, there were 35,000 cases of polio globally but in 2018, there were only 33. I remember the wonderful work of the rotarians and their PolioPlus campaign, spreading the polio vaccine all around the world. It seemed as though this was an unstoppable course to having healthier citizens through a civilised approach.

Some 150 potentially life-saving vaccines are currently being tested, which is absolutely phenomenal. So now we have to study the extraordinary phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy, which for many of us really is a paradox. Why should people be against vaccinating their children? Some believe that vaccines are no longer necessary or that they cause autism, but Andrew Wakefield has been comprehensively discredited for his work that tried to connect autism and bowel disease to MMR. It was a really disgraceful piece of work. Some believe that doctors and scientists cannot be trusted; that vaccines contain harmful levels of toxins; or that they can overload a child’s immune system. It seems as though, once again, this is an adverse effect of our wonderful, modern and interconnected world of social media. Scare stories are thrown up and it is almost impossible to rebut them.

There may also be a lack of trust in doctors and nurses. But goodness knows, their figures for inspiring confidence and being trusted, at 96% and 92%, are a lot better than those for government Ministers or politicians, which are at 22% and 19%. I still think we should hold on to the doctors and nurses to promote the programme.

The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, talked about the worrying fall in levels in the UK despite our comprehensive National Health Service, our focus on prevention and so forth. The World Health Organization has devised a 3Cs model in its vaccine communications working group, referring to complacency, convenience and confidence. We do have a degree of complacency. In the UK, before vaccines were introduced, each year 3,500 people died of diphtheria, 200 of tetanus, 1,000 of pertussis, 200 of polio and 60 of haemophilus influenzae. Perhaps people have lost the fear factor that has been there for so long.

On convenience, we have a comprehensive health service. There is of course always room for improvement, but it is there for all. On confidence, the evidence is absolutely there.

I congratulate the Government on some of the recent vaccinations that have become available. The service is phenomenal. Now, we have vaccinations for children’s flu, rotavirus, shingles, MenB and MenACWY. Similarly, I congratulate them on some of their screening programmes. I campaigned long and hard for screening programmes for abdominal aortic aneurysm, bowel cancer, breast cancer and so on.

What must we do to promote this issue and encourage people to live up to their responsibilities? We have the convenience and I have the conviction. I want the Minister to let us know what not only the Government but all of us can do to help to bring back urgency in taking up these wonderful opportunities.