Swine Flu

Baroness Morgan of Cotes Excerpts

Monday 10th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. Many right hon. and hon. Members are seeking to catch my eye. If I am to have any realistic chance of accommodating the interest of most Members, short questions and answers alike will be essential.

[Nicky Morgan (Loughborough) (Con)]

The Secretary of State is right that general practitioners are on the front line, and it is to them that patients will turn. Does he have any thoughts on the case of a constituent of mine who contacted me yesterday to say that he has been trying to get a vaccination, but has been unable to do so because he wants to have one after 4 o’clock in the afternoon, when he can get away from work? He does not want to jeopardise his job and is finding it difficult to access the vaccination before then, but GPs would rather vaccinate in the morning.

[Mr Lansley]

The arrangements that individual GP surgeries make for ordering and administering doses of the vaccine have been, since October, for them to make. From our point of view, as soon as we were aware that local supply would not necessarily match local demand in the places it should, we took the decision last week to make available the NHS stockpile—there are 12.7 million doses of the H1N1 vaccine—and I can tell my hon. Friend that 20,000 doses began to be distributed this morning. There is no reason why we cannot meet the requirement for vaccinations, whether through GPs’ own doses and local arrangements, through issuing NHS prescriptions that can be fulfilled at local pharmacies or through surgeries ordering the H1N1 vaccine from us.