Men’s Health Strategy

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Monday 25th October 2021 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Farmer]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to introduce a men’s health strategy.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Lord Kamall) (Con)]

Average male life expectancy is below female life expectancy in the UK, although women spend a greater proportion of their lives in ill health and disability. We are committed to taking action on the range of specific conditions that affect men particularly, including heart disease, liver disease and cancer. Tackling mental health, including suicide, and smoking—both of which are more prevalent in men—are also an important focus.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for that fairly comprehensive reply and I take this opportunity to welcome him to the Front Bench and give him every wish for good health during his tenure. The latest ONS estimates show that male life expectancy is falling. What analysis have the Government made of the social determinants of health that contribute to this decline, particularly many men’s lack of close relationships? How will they address the fact that, although loneliness is putting significant pressure on GPs, men are less likely than women to come forward?

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for his warm welcome and hope that this continues for some time. To answer his question, the Government regularly consider the social determinants of health, especially how they contribute to our life and healthy life expectancy. We have seen growth in life expectancy slow in line with many countries, which is a challenge that has been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. We have not yet made a specific assessment of how social determinants drive male life expectancy. On the point about men’s loneliness, since the beginning of the pandemic we have invested £34 million in organisations supporting people who experience loneliness, including men.

NHS: Hospital Visiting

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Wednesday 15th September 2021 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Farmer]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to ensure visiting arrangements in all NHS hospitals resume as soon as possible.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Lord Bethell) (Con)]

My Lords, we absolutely recognise the importance of people’s ability to visit their loved ones. Over the pandemic, NHS guidance advised all NHS hospitals to welcome visiting in a Covid-secure way. Now that we are not in a national lockdown, visiting arrangements are set out locally by NHS trusts and other NHS bodies. The health, safety and well-being of patients, staff and communities remains the priority, but careful visiting policies remain appropriate to ensure safe hospital visits.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his Answer. Do the Government collect statistics on the number of in-patients whose mental well-being deteriorates during their stay in hospital? Also, what assessment, if any, has been made of the impact of visits on patients’ mental well-being and recovery?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My noble friend raises an important question. Mental well-being is affected by visiting. We know that particularly from social care, where this has been a particularly onerous problem for those in care and their loved ones. I am not aware of any statistics being assessed but I will look into it and write to him. He makes an extremely important point. We do, however, take statistics on nosocomial infection. I am afraid that is a massive issue, which we must balance at the same time.

Covid-19 Update

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for raising the point again, and my apologies to the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, for not addressing her point the first time around. I will just say that, from 19 July, it has been voluntary for organisations to use and implement the Covid pass under step 4. There are some essential settings where certification should not be used, and we have made that plain.

However, the Government are encouraging and supporting businesses and large events to use the Covid pass. The Government intend to make full vaccination a condition of entry to nightclubs and other venues where large crowds gather from the end of September. Work is under way to find a solution for Northern Ireland citizens who have been vaccinated in England but are registered with a GP in Northern Ireland. We are also very close to establishing data flows with the Isle of Man.

To the noble Lord’s point about those who have had their vaccinations overseas, in countries such as Norway, he is entirely right. We are working extremely hard on those processes. I have met with NHSX and NHSD to talk about this matter and I assure him that we are putting every effort into dealing with it. I wish that we had dealt with it by now. It is an extremely complex matter. The validation and verification of vaccines requires an enormous amount of bilateral and multilateral co-ordination, and the approval of different vaccines taken by different people in different locations and the record keeping by overseas countries are things that we have to consider and manage. He is right: when the Covid pass system is brought in, those who have had a vaccine overseas will need special consideration. I reassure him that we are working as hard as we can to resolve that issue.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, perhaps I might bring up the subject of antibodies. All the statements seem to be focused completely on vaccinations, yet there is growing evidence that those people who have had Covid and have had vaccinations are indeed almost super-immune even to variants. There was an article in today’s Telegraph about that. So my first question is, do the Government have any idea how many people have in fact had Covid? There are an awful lot of people who have not had symptoms, have been at home, have had it and have recovered, and the Government have not really been informed about it. Is there knowledge in the Government about this area and, if so, is research being done on the strength of the antibodies of those who have had Covid and is that being taken into account in policy?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My noble friend has had an interest in this very important area for some time, and I completely applaud his diligence on it. It is an area that I share an absolute fascination with. We know so much about the vaccines but so little about the body’s immune system. It is incredibly frustrating but it is, I am afraid to say, just one aspect of this pandemic.

To answer the specific question of how many people have had the disease, it is difficult to be precise. Unfortunately, a lot of people have had the disease and never known that they had it. The fact that they have now gone on to have a vaccine means that it is extremely difficult for us to trace whether they have had the disease, because we do it mainly through the counting of antibodies. My noble friend can look on the ONS website, which I am sure he probably has, and he will see that the Venn diagram makes it almost impossible to figure out exactly how many people have had the disease. I can, through correspondence, share with him the various modelling that we have done, but there is not a definitive answer to that question.

I wish it were true that having had the disease and the vaccine together creates some kind of super-immunity, but I am afraid that there is a subset of people who have had both the vaccine and the disease who then go on to have the disease again. I have met a few of those people; they are extremely frustrated, as you can imagine. I am afraid that it does not bode well for thinking that the vaccine presents a concrete and immutable guard against the disease. I am afraid we will be living with the thought of boosters and improvements on the vaccine for some time to come. That is emerging as something we are working on. We are doing a tremendous amount of research on this. I had a meeting earlier with the antibody team, and I reassure my noble friend that we are doing everything we can to understand it better.

Covid-19 Update

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Tuesday 29th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I suspect that I have corresponded with the noble Lord from my personal email address; I am deeply hurt that he does not want to receive any of my emails again, but not entirely surprised. The waiting at test and trace has moved dramatically, as I think the noble Lord knows, from the central supply of testing and tracing services to a much more local model, and that does not always manifest itself in the corporate accounts of the organisation. It manifests itself in both the management and the delivery, and I pay huge tribute to those who are involved in the local implementation. As I said earlier, the way in which the delta virus infection rates, which were skyrocketing at one point, have been turned around in places such as Hounslow, Blackburn with Darwen and other areas of the north-west is phenomenally impressive and is a tribute to the impact of test and trace.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, what has the SIREN study most recently established about the effectiveness of infection-induced antibodies over time? Furthermore, as per my Written Question, answered by the Minister on 2 June 2021, why has not Public Health England or another government-backed health body conducted a review of research on the long-term effects of face mask wearing when clinicians such as Antonio Lazzarino from UCL’s Institute of Epidemiology and Health Care cite deleterious health effects?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, SIREN is one of the most thought-provoking and interesting of all the many studies that we have done. It is a sad fact that we do not understand many of the aspects of the body’s immune system, and that is why we are so committed to that study. It suggests that once you have had the virus, your body’s immune system is extremely strong. The proportion of people who catch it a second time round is incredibly small. That is good news for those who have caught it and for those who have had the vaccine, because if the immune system works well after catching the virus, it probably works well after the vaccine. However, we continue to publish from the SIREN study. On the health impacts of wearing face masks, I am not fully across that, but I will be glad to write to my noble friend with any details that I may have.

Covid-19: One Year Report

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Thursday 25th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con) [V]]

My Lords, the Coronavirus Act one-year report, published earlier this week, states:

“Since the start of the pandemic, we have dramatically improved our understanding of the virus: the physiological impact it causes, how it transmits, and most importantly, the measures we can take to reduce infection.”


What it tellingly neglects to say is that we have also, dramatically and painfully, improved our understanding of the mental and physical health impacts of those measures—tellingly, because our draconian restrictions have produced a new social order that has infection reduction as the one overriding priority, regardless of how low infections are.

A public health-determined yardstick of risk is firmly in the ascendant and seems likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Polling showing public support for restrictions cannot be the sole occupant of the driving seat in this House. We are here to scrutinise the likely effects of legislation. We know enough about the effects of lockdowns to give us pause before we renew the regulations being debated.

For the sake of time, I will focus on brain and mind. The monotony of lockdown depletes our memories and makes us sluggish, and screen overload cramps our ability to concentrate. Isolation causes brains to shrink. Lonely people’s brain volumes reduce in the region affecting decision-making and social behaviour. Prolonged isolation affects regions associated with learning, memory and the processing of emotion. Basically, the processing capacity of a brain not constantly challenged through social interaction begins to decline. Loneliness releases stress hormones affecting neuro- transmitters such as dopamine, serotonin and adrenaline, which profoundly influence brain function and mood. It also sharply increases the rate of Alzheimer’s disease among the elderly.

Finally, uncertainty drowns creativity—the elixir of progress and the main natural resource for our island race. We were told that the road map would bring certainty, but instead its rate-determining steps inherently mean constantly changing goalposts. For example, if risk assessment is fundamentally changed by new variants of concern, does that mean, as some fear, that our borders will remain indefinitely closed?

Fear is an important factor, which the Government and their spokespeople in the scientific community seem to have no interest in dissipating, possibly because they see it as a vital tool of social control to force people to abide by our particularly extreme restrictions. Their effect has been to penalise the many, due to fear of the misbehaviour of the few. Holidays always seem one more unattainable metric away.

Many parallels have been drawn with the Second World War and the need to keep morale high over that long campaign. I am not a historian of that period, but I seem to recall that the population were regularly inspired to keep going. The diet of public pronouncements we have been living on cannot be so described. Deaths—key to another of the four criteria—are now even lower than in non-Covid times, but this is hardly mentioned. Fear can now be retired and inspiration can take its place.

Finally, if SAGE meeting attendance is determined by the Chief Scientific Adviser and the Chief Medical Officer, surely the likely emphasis will be the low level of risk acceptable to public health, leaving little oxygen for mental health and other considerations, such as the need to boost morale, resuscitate the economy and get those who have been laid off working again. My question for the Minister is: at what daily rate of infections, hospitalisations and deaths will we unlock?

At the risk of sounding dramatic, many are concluding that a world run according to a level of risk acceptable to public health is one that might be hardly worth living in. It is absolutely clear that, when the day of reckoning comes as to their handling of the pandemic, the Government will be held to account not just for how well they held down infections but for how they balanced this against these other harms that have emerged over this torrid year.

Women’s Health Strategy

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Tuesday 9th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Duncan of Springbank) (Con)]

My Lords, we now come to the 20 minutes allocated for Back-Bench questions. There are 13 questioners and only 20 minutes, so pith is the order of the day.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I have constantly argued against the lack of emphasis on prevention in the Domestic Abuse Bill and have been assured that the domestic abuse strategy and guidance will fill that gap. Domestic abuse disproportionately affects women’s mental and physical ill health, so will the new women’s health strategy prioritise its primary prevention, rather than, as usual, simply addressing its terrible harms?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

I pay tribute to my noble friend for his campaigning on this important cause. It is not the specific focus of the health strategy but it will play a part in it, and I encourage my noble friend to submit the characteristically detailed evidence, for which he is so well known, to this important evidence-gathering process.

Covid-19 Vaccines Deployment

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Thursday 11th February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I do hear the noble Baroness and I would be happy to look into this matter further. However, my understanding is that the vaccination rates among care home staff are much higher than she describes. It is not unusual for care home staff to have their health provided for by the local NHS, and for them to be required to travel to receive that support. That is quite normal for anyone getting a vaccine, even if they work in social care. It is entirely in our interests to make sure that social care staff are vaccinated, so there is no way that there is any kind of policy or deliberate effort to avoid vaccinating care home staff. However, I will be glad to look into this further and, if I may, I will copy the noble Baroness into the correspondence that will clearly result from this debate.

[Lord Farmer (Con) [V]]

My Lords, having vaccinated the vulnerable tiers, at what level do we revert to normal, bearing in mind, first, that the remaining population is highly unlikely to require hospitalisation or to die from Covid; and, secondly, the mental health stresses which are starting to unravel our social fabric? On that note, do any members of SAGE have recognised expertise in mental health, so that their advice is weighted to this consideration as well as to others?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, the honest truth is that I cannot lay out a timetable for my noble friend. That will happen in the week of 22 February and the Prime Minister has made that clear. He is entirely right that the vaccine dramatically reduces hospitalisation and death. Target groups 1 to 4 account for nearly 90% of the deaths, so this is a dramatically improved situation. However, it does not remove the threat of Covid altogether. At the moment we have an infection rate of around 2% in the country. Were we to open up tomorrow, that infection rate might lead to a much higher rate: 10% or 20%. If we ran at a rate of 20% we would have a very large number of young people who would end up in hospital one way or the other, and who might experience long-standing damage from the Covid disease. We would also increase the rate of mutations in our own country and we would have a great displacement of that effect on the rest of the NHS system.

So this is not a binary game in which we have suddenly hit the moment where we can lift everything. We have to tread cautiously on that. However, I agree with my noble friend that the mental health impact of the lockdown is intense. I reassure him that two members of the SAGE subgroup SPI-B are members of the British Psychological Society. SPI-B presents the independent expert behavioural science to advise the top SAGE—the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies—and it brings to the debate a very clear insight on mental health and brings to our awareness the impact of lockdown, which, as my noble friend quite rightly points out, is immense.

Covid-19: Vaccinations

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Wednesday 13th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I would put the truism slightly differently: the vaccine makes you pretty safe, but it does not mean you are not dangerous to other people. I think we all have to get used to that. Regarding the South African variant and the other variants popping up in Brazil and elsewhere, this is a manifestly different disease that is growing up around the world. It has a huge implication for international travel. We are working with the WHO and other groups to try to understand this, but it is certainly of grave concern to the country.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I join many others in applauding the Minister and the Government on their vaccination energy and foresight, and for being leaders in the world, frankly. Given the Minister’s zeal and energy, he informed the House on 30 November that the SIREN and Oxford healthcare workers studies would report on the level of sterilising immunity provided by natural infection before the end of 2020. Have they concluded that antibody protection can be relied upon for at least six months after infection, or longer, and what are the implications for herd immunity?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, the SIREN study is an important study on antibody protection. My understanding is that it is due to be published very soon indeed, and when it is, I will be glad to share the insight with my noble friend.

Covid-19: Variant

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Wednesday 13th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

The noble Baroness is entirely right that the EpiData showed that the figures shot up in December; that is exactly why we looked extremely carefully at the genomic data from Kent and other places. As she knows, genomic data takes time to process—the tests can take a week to turn around. Looking at all the variants and matching EpiData figures with genomic data is an enormously complicated mathematical task. We moved as swiftly as possible and far faster than in many other countries.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, at the Downing Street press conference of 5 January, we were told that people had protection from the new variant if they had already been infected. What is the Government’s estimate of the number of people in the UK who now have antibodies after contracting the virus and are therefore likely to be immune? What is their approach to the large population of such people, estimated by Professor Neil Ferguson to be at 25% to 30% in London, and their need for vaccination?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, PHE weekly seroprevalence data suggests that antibody prevalence among blood donors aged 16-plus in England is 6.9%, which is consistent with other data that we have. The MHRA has considered this and has decided that vaccinating is just as important for those who have had Covid-19 as it is for those who have not.

Covid-19 Update

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Monday 30th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I am not sure that I accept the premise of the question. The scepticism that the noble Baroness describes has not stopped millions of people stepping forward to have tests. Our experience is that those who have direct experience of test and trace—whether they are people who use the app, people who turn up for testing, people who go to hospital and have tests through the NHS or people who are traced—speak of the good service and experience that they have. It is undoubtedly true that test and trace takes a hammering in the press, and its reputation has been hard hit by sceptics who talk down its performance, but, generally speaking, those who actually experience it speak highly of the service.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, just 10 days ago, Professor David Eyre of the University of Oxford reported that, for most people, being infected with Covid-19 protects against reinfection for at least six months. He said:

“This is really good news, because we can be confident that, at least in the short term, most people who get COVID-19 won’t get it again.”


Washington State University research found that just one case out of the multiple millions worldwide suggested that waning antibody levels or a poorly developed immune system to Covid could put people at risk of reinfection. I am aware that studies need to be replicated, but this good news seems to be a very well-kept secret, ignored on the official government web page on the relevance of antibody tests. What would give the Government confidence that potent antibodies linger beyond at least six months in the majority of cases and how small would the tiny minority of proven cases of reinfection have to be in order for them to say that this risk is a price worth paying for society to begin to get back on its feet?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, the Government—and I personally—are extremely interested in this area. Early findings of a study by the Coronavirus Immunology Consortium and Public Health England, which have not been peer reviewed yet, suggest that a strong cellular immune response is likely to be present in the majority of adults six months after infection. At present, there is not enough evidence to rule out people who have positive T cell responses or antibodies to Covid-19 from potentially still playing a role in transmitting the virus to others. However, further research on the level of sterilising immunity provided by natural infection should be available from the SIREN study and the Oxford healthcare workers study before the end of the year. I look forward to the results of those studies very much.