Coronavirus Vaccine

Lord Scriven Excerpts

Thursday 3rd December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

I welcome the noble Lord’s challenge and completely endorse his point that tracing will remain important. Not everyone will take the vaccine initially; it will not be available to everyone for months, as the Deputy Chief Medical Officer made plain in his briefing earlier today. Tracing remains a really important feature of our fight against this disease. However, I respectfully suggest that his information is a little out of date: the amount of collaboration on tracing between the national and local efforts, particularly with DPHs such as the one in Cumbria, has come on in leaps and bounds, even in the last few weeks. From my briefings and meetings with DPHs, I know that they have been provided with an enormous amount of data, support and access to tracing resources in order both to bring their local intelligence and insight to bear and to support the national tracing effort. I applaud all those DPHs who have stepped forward in this way, and I am very hopeful that the local-national combination on tracing will pay massive dividends.

[Lord Scriven (LD) [V]]

My Lords, in the first priority group, there are over 3.2 million people aged 80 or over. As the UK will get doses for 400,000 people initially, what access framework is in place to ensure an ethical approach to the vaccine rollout for these first 400,000 people that is not based on having the sharpest elbows or the chance of having a hospital appointment?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord raises an important challenge there; fairness and equity are important in this important time. However, I will try to assess the situation: we have 800,000 doses of a vaccine that is incredibly difficult to transport, requires cold storage and is in vials containing more than 100 doses each. Therefore, practical considerations are pre-eminent at the moment, rather than sharp elbows.