Coronavirus

Debate between Aaron Bell and Graham Stringer

Wednesday 16th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

As ever, it is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Sir Charles Walker). On his interesting point about SAGE, we could do with full disclosure from the Government about all the facts that they have available to them on covid. In the Science and Technology Committee this morning, we were told that vaccinations have saved 14,000 lives. I have no doubt that that is an accurate figure, but there are many figures that have not been given. As we said the last time we debated this issue, only one side of the equation is given. Let me ask this question: how many lives have been lost in order to save capacity in the NHS? When it comes to looking at people untested and untreated for cancer, heart disease and other diseases, we will find that the figures are of a similar, if not greater, magnitude than the number of people who have died from covid.

We should have transparency and open declarations of what really happened with the 26,000 deaths in care homes, where untested people were sent from hospital. We should have disclosure about all those people who were triaged by age and who were not treated, and all those people in care homes who were not allowed into hospitals because they were not taking people from care homes. There is a great deal more information that we require in order to make a rational decision about whether the lockdown should continue. I agree with the right hon. Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) that what we have here is the Government asking for emergency powers when there is no longer an emergency.

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

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way; we were in the Science and Technology Committee this morning. Does he share my disquiet at the fact that the vaccine effectiveness numbers that Public Health England has published—96% effectiveness against hospitalisation from two doses of Pfizer, and 92% from Oxford-AstraZeneca—are much higher than the numbers that have been plugged into the models used by Imperial and the London School of Hygiene and Medical to underpin the data that the Government are relying on?

[Graham Stringer]

I agree completely that those sorts of numbers—the real numbers, as opposed to model numbers—are the numbers that should have been plugged into that model. They would have given a different scenario. The hon. Gentleman makes my point: in order to come to rational decisions about what risks we should take as a country and what risks individuals should take, we should have all the information up to date and available. The Government have refused on a number of occasions to give out that information. They have run a campaign to scare people into accepting their decisions.

To go back to the comments of the hon. Member for Broxbourne, who was talking about elections to SAGE, at least the behavioural psychologists who advise the Government have made a public apology. They say that they have undermined their professional credibility by joining the campaign of fear. I wish that the Government would not only put out more information, but apologise for frightening people. They should not frighten the electorate, and they certainly should not frighten people in this Chamber into taking people’s liberties away.

One of the things that has annoyed me most in the last 15 months is when the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care say, “We instruct you”—meaning the population—“to do various things,” when there is nothing in the legislation that would give the Secretary of State or the Prime Minister the ability to instruct individuals. We live in a liberal democracy in which we pass laws that are enforced by the police, and then the courts make a decision if there is a prosecution, not one in which the Secretary of State acts like some kind of uniformed Minister of the Interior.

I will vote against the regulations today. We need a more direct debate on the issue and we need what Members have searched for—a straightforward comparison, with real statistics, of what risks everybody faces.

Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Debate between Aaron Bell and Graham Stringer

Report stage & 3rd reading
Monday 7th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Aaron Bell]

It really is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Guildford (Angela Richardson), who is one of my best friends in this place; it was a pleasure to serve on the Bill Committee with her and with so many other hon. Members present. Along with the hon. Member for Brent Central (Dawn Butler), my hon. Friend and I served both on the Science and Technology Committee when it conducted a report on what at the time we were calling ARPA, and on the Bill Committee, so I have felt a real sense of personal involvement in the process as it has developed.

Since I will not speak on Third Reading, I would like to thank everyone who has been a part of the process, particularly the Clerks of the Bill Committee; the Minister for her dedication; and the Whip, whom I see in his place, for his help on our side of the Committee. It was a very good-natured Bill Committee, as others have said. Some amendments that we are debating today are rather similar to those that we rejected in Committee, but obviously that is how Report works. I will not labour all the same points again, but I will speak briefly on them later in my speech.

Science is cool again, because science has saved us in the past year. It is not just about the vaccines—extraordinary though they are, particularly the mRNA advances. It is also about what we were able to achieve with Sarah Gilbert’s Oxford project, which I am very proud is being manufactured in my constituency at Keele science park in Newcastle-under-Lyme; what we have done scientifically in finding therapeutics through our world-leading recovery trial; and the advances that we have seen in rapid tests to enable the incredible amount of testing that we now have in the UK.

However, I would like to add a note of caution, because covid has also exposed some of the problems we see in science and some of the problems in the networks that the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer) spoke about earlier. I am talking particularly about the so-called lab leak hypothesis—the theory that covid emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology rather than from a zoonotic transmission. We saw some of the worst of science and the media over that, but it was essentially shut down by a letter to The Lancet organised by the EcoHealth Alliance and its president, Peter Daszak, which squashed the theory on 18 February last year. Let us face it, the theory was assisted by Donald Trump and Senator Tom Cotton in the States taking the opposite view, and there was this whole politicisation of something that should have been about scientific inquiry. Speaking as a Bayesian, and based on everything I have seen, including the fact that the virus was in Wuhan in the first place, and on everything we have seen since, I believe it probably was a lab leak. I would go as far as to stake an 80% probability on that, and I think we should bear that in mind when we think about what we are asking of ARIA.

We do not want ARIA to get politicised and legalised, and we do not want it to fall into the same group-think that we have seen in some science, with a tendency to defend your mates and the people you know in your network and stick up for the institution rather than the principles behind the science. Instead, the DRASTIC group—the decentralised radical autonomous search team investigating covid-19—a bunch of people on the internet, correspondents and scientifically inquisitive people around the world, have managed to bring the lab leak hypothesis back to public attention to the point where it is clearly being actively considered by our intelligence services and our scientific community. I think we need some of that spirit in ARIA. We need that spirit of inquiry and of people outside the system getting their fair say in the system—the Einsteins in the Patent Office, as others have said.

On the amendments about cronyism, what we saw with the appointment of Kate Bingham was a complete disgrace. That is the sort of thing I worry about with some of the amendments to the Bill. I think “everyday sexism” is the term to describe the abuse she got on her appointment. We had the Runnymede Trust trying to go to court to get her appointment declared unlawful, the so-called Good Law Project seeking to crowdfund against her appointment, the leader of the Liberal Democrat party saying that she must resign and Labour’s deputy leader saying “this cronyism stinks”. The truth is that she was the best qualified person for that job. She was appointed at speed because of the circumstances we were in, and she has delivered in spades. If the rumours about her damehood are correct, she richly deserves it and we all owe her an enormous debt.

[Graham Stringer]

On the Science and Technology Committee, we often share similar views and attitudes to science, and I agree with the hon. Gentleman about the violence of the language that is sometimes used; it is completely unacceptable. When emergency decisions are taken, as they were with the vaccine taskforce and with Test and Trace, there needs to be an assessment afterwards. I hope he agrees that it would be a very different assessment for Test and Trace than it would be for the vaccine taskforce.

[Aaron Bell]

I thank the hon. Gentlemen for raising that. As a member of the Science and Technology Committee, he knows that we were looking at producing further reports into both Test and Trace and the vaccine programme as a result of our inquiry. I think the Test and Trace programme has actually got to a very good place now: the number of tests we are achieving is the envy of many other countries around the world. We could quite happily say that the vaccine taskforce is an exemplar for everything that went well, and that the Test and Trace programme has been more mixed—[Laughter.] The hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah) on the Opposition Front Bench laughs, but I think that the Test and Trace programme has helped our recovery from the worst of the covid pandemic. It is not the case that all that money has been wasted, as some Opposition Members say, and it is certainly not the case that it has all gone on cronyism; it has gone on the cost of the tests. That is what it has gone on. Contact tracing is hard. Some people do not want to be contact traced, but the role that Test and Trace has played is still significant, although perhaps not as significant as we hoped initially. I am sure we will move on with that in our inquiry.

Returning to what I was saying about the amendments seeking to give ARIA a mission statement, my hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) gave the House some good reasons to reject them. First, there is no point spending just a little bit of money on things that already have billions thrown at them; we should be looking at the things we do not necessarily even know about yet. I also think we should avoid circumscribing ARIA’s freedom. Likewise, on all the amendments that are trying to impose more bureaucracy on ARIA, the whole point is to do things differently, with freedom from all the usual processes and pressures that act on these sorts of bodies.

We need to empower scientists. My hon. Friend the Member for Ynys Môn (Virginia Crosbie) quoted Professor Bond, who said of freedom of information in his evidence to the Bill Committee:

“In terms of the level of transparency, transparency is a good and wonderful thing in most areas, but if you are asking people to go out on a limb to really push the envelope, I would assert that there is an argument, which has some validity, that you make it psychologically much easier for them if they do not feel that they are under a microscope. Many people tend to step back when they are there.”

Some of the burdens that people are seeking to put on ARIA would potentially circumscribe it and reduce its effectiveness. The Bill does still have a statutory commitment to transparency. We will have regular reports, and I am sure that our Committee will be regularly engaged not only with the Secretary of State, who is in his place, but with the chief executive and the chairman of ARIA, who will come to speak to us as well.

ARIA needs to have the freedom to fail. In that sense, it needs to be a macrocosm of all its individual projects that also need to have the freedom to fail. Let us truly empower ARIA by rejecting these amendments. Let us let ARIA take flight and shoot for the stars, not weigh it down and prevent it from ever reaching the escape velocity it needs and the chance that it has to boldly go—returning to the “Star Trek” references we had in the Bill Committee—not into outer space but to the very cutting edge of scientific research and discovery. If we pass this Bill today, it will be a great day for science in the United Kingdom.