Public Health

Aaron Bell Excerpts

Wednesday 30th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Aaron Bell (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Con) [V]]

It is a pleasure to follow a typically excellent speech from my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Anthony Browne). I thank the House staff for all they have done to make today possible. It has been a momentous day both in this Chamber and in plenty of living rooms around the country. Not only have we had the Brexit Bill, but we have been discussing some of the most serious matters on the domestic front for many years.

I also pay tribute to all the NHS and testing centre staff who have been working not just throughout the whole pandemic, but particularly over the Christmas period. It is noticeable from the figures that we have kept up our testing rate over Christmas, whereas other countries have not necessarily done that, so I pay tribute to everyone who has given up their Christmas to try to make our lives a bit better.

We started today with the welcome news about the vaccine. It is a huge triumph for British science—I say to my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire that I am going to call it the Oxford vaccine—but I just wonder whether the world as a whole may look back and consider whether we could have proceeded differently with the vaccine. I was struck by a recent article saying that Moderna actually had its vaccine produced in January. Perhaps if we had taken a different approach, maybe using supersized trials once we prove the basic safety of a vaccine, we might have mitigated some of the enormous costs of the pandemic this year.

That is perhaps a question for the Science and Technology Committee, on which I sit, and I praise the Committee’s staff for letting us hold an emergency evidence session on 23 December, in which we had three witnesses from NERVTAG, led by the excellent Professor Peter Horby, who explained the new variant and all its details. I have to say that, as we have all heard, the numbers about how quickly it can spread are pretty worrying.

Before I move on to talk about tiers more generally, I want to welcome the statutory instrument on self-isolation that we are debating today. Again, it is something we have discussed in our Committee, and moving from 14 to 10 days is an evidenced-based and probability-based move. I do not think that those final four days of isolation have been cutting out many cases at all, and they cannot really be justified, so I am glad that the Government have moved on that.

I am no lockdown enthusiast. How can I be with Newcastle-under-Lyme being put into tier 4 today? It is a decision that will cause a lot of hardship. Indeed, I said in my first ever virtual speech in this Chamber on 4 May, when we were debating the first coronavirus SIs, that

“any future calculus needs to recognise properly all the costs of lockdown: health, economic and social.”—[Official Report, 4 May 2020; Vol. 675, c. 464.]

That still holds, but I have to be a lockdown realist as well, and we must look at both sides of the equation. Contrary to some commentators, the figures, especially from the November national lockdown, are clear that lockdowns and strict measures do actually work and that they can get things under control. We will have to wait and see whether they will be sufficient for the new variant, because we do not yet have all the data, but the vaccine has changed the calculus. We are no longer looking at an indefinite lockdown. We have light at the end of the tunnel, and we have a clear goal to aim for.

Some of the commentators who are so prominent on social media—often in the comments on our own pages—are dead set against lockdowns, but they keep moving the goalposts. First, they were asking, “Where are the cases?” and then there were cases. They asked, “Where are the hospitalisations?” and, sure as night follows day, there were hospitalisations. Then they said, “But where are the deaths?” Well, 981 deaths were reported today, and I am afraid to say that number is only going to increase based on everything we know about this virus and the lags involved.

In recent days, those commentators have taken to the rather tasteless statistic that only 388 under-60s with no underlying condition have died with coronavirus in the UK. First, 388 is quite a large number, and we should be worried about that, but what about the over-60s? What about those who have underlying conditions? What about people with manageable underlying conditions such as mild asthma? Are we really saying that the people over 60 or people with underlying conditions are somehow worth less in this calculus? People who make that case should think about what it says about their value system. It is right that the Government have rejected that approach throughout and have sought to protect the most vulnerable, and it is right that society has done that, with people who are not at much risk from coronavirus making sacrifices.

As others have said, we have had two major changes since we last met to discuss coronavirus in this place: the variant and the vaccine. They really have changed things. Before, we were perhaps in what you might call a siege— an unpleasant one that was certainly driving people stir crazy. Now, we are in a race instead. Given that we are in a race—the variant is spreading more rapidly and the vaccines are coming on board quicker and quicker—the Government must use all their tools to slow the procession of the virus and that, unfortunately, includes tighter lockdowns and measures such as today’s. Just as importantly, the Government must use all their tools to speed up the vaccinations, and I urge them to do that.