Covid-19: Variant B.1.617.2 Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateLord Hunt of Kings Heath
Main Page: Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Labour - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Hunt of Kings Heath's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(3 years, 5 months ago)
Lords ChamberThe noble Lord is entirely right, and I am grateful that he has looked at the dashboard as carefully as he clearly has done and drunk deeply from the rich array of data that we have available there. On a more serious point, there are some significant outbreaks—they are listed very clearly on the PHE dashboard—where we have put in place significant outbreak management procedures, including surge vaccination, surge testing and additional communication with the community. But the noble Lord is right that the Indian variant is proving to be extremely competitive with the Kent variant, and we should expect that to start to spread around the country.
My Lords, can the noble Lord update the House on the potential vaccination of secondary school children?
I am afraid I do not have a specific update for the noble Lord. It is an area that we will be extremely interested in looking at, but there are regulatory processes to be gone through at the MHRA and vaccine policy procedures to be gone through at the JCVI. They will both be looking at that. At the moment, our focus is on getting the vaccine into as many arms as we possibly can, particularly among the high priority groups, but we will turn to that at some point in the future.