Covid-19 Update

Lord Taylor of Goss Moor Excerpts

Tuesday 8th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

I am extremely grateful for my noble friend’s comments on the Olympics, and we wish our Olympic champions all the best luck. We keep our fingers crossed for Tokyo, under very difficult circumstances. On the vaccination programme, he is entirely right: positive influences are key. It has been interesting that the positive influences we think have made the biggest impact are not necessarily only the celebrities—they are community influencers who work in clinical settings and are present at a grass-roots level in communities. That is why a large volume of videos, endorsements, community meetings and answering quite reasonable, but sometimes very sensitive, questions from the public have been the essence of our vaccination communications programme. It seems to be extremely successful: the younger age groups seem to be stepping up for the vaccine in proportions that we could not have believed possible some months ago, and we hope very much that this will continue.

[Lord Taylor of Goss Moor (LD) [V]]

My Lords, my 13 year-old son is a chorister at Truro Cathedral, where they have composed a song, “Gee Seven”, which 25,000 children across this country and others will sing online to G7 leaders tomorrow. He says the thing that they want most is for the parents and grandparents of children in poorer countries that have not had access to vaccines to get the access that parents and grandparents have had in this country, so that those other children can feel safe about their families. Will the Minister and his colleagues think about that before vaccinating teenagers in this country, who are not at great risk? The COVAX programme is currently 192 million doses short of its targets for supporting poorer countries. Incidentally, if that is not enough morally, he might also consider that so long as we are not successfully vaccinating in these poorer countries, the chances of new and more dangerous variants coming to this country and causing deaths again are all the more likely.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord points out a dreadful dilemma that is on our minds all the time. I completely agree with his point that supporting those in the developing world is a priority and responsibility for those of us in the developed world. His son is entirely right that we should be thinking very much of those who are vulnerable or in urgent need as we consider our vaccination programme. But our responsibility as a Government is to the British people. We must look after the British people first, and there is no benefit to anywhere in the world if Britain comes close to shaking off this awful virus but falls over at the last minute because we have not seen the job through. We intend to support COVAX in the way he describes—in particular, the manufacturing of the vaccine in regional hubs. There, the AstraZeneca and Oxford vaccine has played a critical role. The profit-free availability and generous licensing arrangements being offered by AstraZeneca are having a huge impact on the global rollout of the vaccine. In the meantime, we are absolutely driving through the vaccine programme here in the UK, in the knowledge that, if Britain can emerge safely, that is of benefit not only to British taxpayers and patients but to the whole world.