Covid-19: Wuhan Institute of Virology
Debate between Viscount Ridley and Lord Bethell(3 years, 4 months ago)
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Viscount Ridley
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the possibility that the COVID-19 virus escaped from a laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Lord Bethell) (Con)
My Lords, with the increasing threat of zoonotic diseases crossing the animal-human divide, learning how Covid was transmitted to humans and is spread is absolutely crucial to preventing future pandemics. The much-delayed WHO-convened Covid origin study reported on phase 1 of its investigation in March. The report made recommendations for further studies. The Government’s belief is that it is vital that phase 2 of the investigation does not face the same delays and that it is given full access to the data necessary for the next part of its work.
Viscount Ridley (Con)
I thank my noble friend for that Answer. Viruses like this have not been found near Wuhan in bats or any other animals. The closest relative to this virus was brought to Wuhan by scientists from 1,000 miles away to a laboratory that had been manipulating SARS-like viruses for 15 years. There it was sequenced in 2017 and 2018 in a biosecurity level 2 laboratory. Most of that information was found out by independent investigators, not volunteered by the Chinese authorities. Will my noble friend unequivocally condemn that lack of transparency and join other nations in calling for a full and independent investigation? Will he clarify who is in charge in the British Government of answering that question?
World Health Organization: Pandemics
Debate between Viscount Ridley and Lord Bethell(3 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Bethell (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her tribute to the Hygiene and Behaviour Change Coalition. I cannot offer guarantees from the Dispatch Box on its future funding, but I will inquire about the matter. As the noble Baroness suggests, it sounds like a fascinating and important project.
Viscount Ridley (Con) [V]
My Lords, after last month’s embarrassing Potemkin investigation of Wuhan, will my noble friend the Minister ask the WHO to insist that the Chinese Government release the genome sequences of eight bat viruses of the so-called 7896 clade held in the Wuhan Institute of Virology database that are known to be very closely related to SARS-CoV-2 and may hold critical clues, but which they refuse to release?
Lord Bethell (Con)
My Lords, we are extremely hopeful for the IPPPR process, and we have supported the team in its desire to get to the bottom of its investigations. I do not know the specifics of the bat viruses to which my noble friend refers, but I reassure him that the British Government are leaning on the WHO as hard as we possibly can to make the most of this important investigation.
Covid-19: Transparency and Accuracy of Statistics
Debate between Viscount Ridley and Lord Bethell(4 years ago)
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Lord Bethell (Con)
The noble Baroness is right to pinpoint the sharing of data as being very important, and we have been as open and transparent as we can be. We publish an enormous amount of data. Just before this debate, I tweeted three of the main portals to the data, which there is not only an unprecedented quantity of but which is more up to date than could reasonably have been expected a few months ago, when such data was not available. Some of these decisions are made extremely quickly because the data changes so quickly. Sometimes, one believes that we are on track for one thing, and then the virus changes course and we have to change our policies accordingly. That is simply a fact of the challenge of fighting this virus: speed is of the essence, and sometimes it has been extremely difficult to do the kinds of consultation that the noble Baroness quite reasonably describes.
Viscount Ridley (Con) [V]
My Lords, my noble friend the Minister just said that the data changes quickly. Does he accept that all three datasets published towards the end of last week on reliable information on the number of positive cases, which is to say those of the Office for National Statistics, the government dashboard and King's College London’s COVID symptom study, all point to the second wave having already peaked and being on the way down, unlike the faulty models used to justify lockdown last weekend? Does he accept that this gives the Government every reason to pause the decision to impose a national lockdown and reconsider it?
Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Debate between Viscount Ridley and Lord Bethell
Lord Bethell
The noble Baroness raises an issue that is uppermost in our minds: the care of and provision for the aged, who are clearly the most vulnerable to this virus and whose support will be most hard-hit by the virus itself. It is clearly a dilemma that the Government are struggling with. We are seeking to delay the spread of the virus as much as possible so that the peak does not knock out in one go all those who provide support, so that mitigation provisions can be put in place. I reassure the noble Baroness that when we talk about volunteers, we are not talking just about family members: we are talking about full community commitment.
Viscount Ridley (Con)
Can my noble friend advise us on the accuracy of the screening tests? Do we know whether there is a degree of false negatives, where people test clear but in fact have the virus? Are there any false positives, where tests show that people have the virus when they do not? For example, they might have a different kind of coronavirus—one of the common cold ones.
Lord Bethell
This question arose in the debate last week and I followed it up with the Chief Medical Officer. As far as I understand it, there is no issue with the testing. It is possible that some people seemingly recover—their symptoms fade from view—but they are still infected with the virus. We are working hard to understand how this works.