Covid-19 Vaccine

Alex Norris Excerpts

Tuesday 10th November 2020 Westminster Hall

[Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship for the first time, Mr Dowd. I am grateful to the hon. Member for North Herefordshire (Bill Wiggin) for initiating today’s debate on this topic. Timing is everything in politics, and his is clearly spot-on. Similarly, a rare political skill is the ability to make the complex comprehendible, and he really did that in his setting out of the debate. I do not know who is watching, but I did plug this debate when I was on Sky News at lunchtime, so I hope a few people are, because that was the best explanation that I have heard, and certainly the best one that can be distilled into about 15 minutes, of just how rigorous the process is. I hope people will take from that explanation the reassurance that although we are keen for the vaccine to succeed, there is a rigorous process. It has not been retrofitted to fit the vaccination’s journey, so we should have some confidence in that.

To reflect on the two Back-Bench contributions, when the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) referred to it being bit of good news, = he was speaking for all of us. He mentioned the groups that will be prioritised, and I think there will be a high level of consensus on that. Hopefully, it is something that we will settle on very quickly. I was cheered by the hon. Member for Henley (John Howell), who talked about the Council of Europe and the World Health Organisation, because those are exactly the sorts of fora that we need to engage with to get an equitable distribution around the world. It is hard for all of us; this is why political consensus is so important. It is hard for us to tell our constituents why we feel there needs to be a global distribution when people are so desperate to get their lives back to normal, but we know there is both a moral and a pragmatic obligation to do that. The organisations that the hon. Gentleman talked about are exactly the places for those conversations.

On the politics of this, it is really important that we do not mess around or be mischievous with the idea of the vaccine. There is a big public conversation about this. Any look of doubt from us would be magnified significantly. As community leaders, we have a responsibility to say that we trust the process. The outcome is whatever the outcome is, but the process itself is a proper one that we trust. That is certainly what hon. Members will see from the Opposition.

Yesterday’s news on the progress and the efficacy of the vaccine will have cheered all of us. I know that the Government are on record with regard to doses from that particular provider, but when we add in the AstraZeneca-University of Oxford one and the Moderna one, might the Minister be able to tell us how many pre-orders have been put in place for the vaccinations? That would help us to gauge the scale. I know the Government have laid the pitch for the roll-out through the changes to the human medicines regulations, and significant changes were made, including giving the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency the powers to grant temporary authorisation pending the granting of a licence.

I was grateful for the time that the Minister gave me with her and the deputy chief medical officer to talk about those changes, but when will there be a parliamentary opportunity to do so? We need to demonstrate that we have scrutinised this properly because the public want to know that we are talking about these things to the fullest extent. That would also allow us to address the point about immunity from civil liberty that the manufacturers and healthcare professionals are seeking, which is not surprising, but there are important and significant qualifiers around that not extending to sufficiently serious breaches. Will the Minister explain what a sufficiently serious breach would look like, or when we might have an occasion to talk about that further?

On vaccine hesitancy, it seems there are distinct phases. We have the anti-vax movement, which is about the substance of vaccinations to an extent, but it also about a broad range of other things. As our constituency mailbags will reflect, there is also a group of people who are hesitant, which is entirely understandable. They want to know that any vaccination, whichever one it is, is a safe one, but it is telling that last year the WHO had vaccine hesitancy in its top 10 threats to global health—up there with a future pandemic. That is something that we need to be aware of. We know that such speculation and the stuff that moves online at an incredible pace can really damage the process. For example, in Denmark in 2013 there were false claims from a documentary about the HPV vaccine, which led to a decline in uptake among some of the cohorts from levels of around 90%. Similarly, between 2014 and 2017 in Ireland, vocal attacks on the HPV vaccine from the anti-vaccine lobby led to a drop in take-up from 70% to 50%. These things matter. One thing that best counters them is proactive, positive health promotion campaigns. I am keen to hear whether the Government plan to talk about these things to educate the population ahead of time, but, again, it something that we all need to buy into, share and push out on a cross-party basis.

An area where I think there might be a little more room for divergence is delivery. We do not know what the future holds for the vaccine or when things will pop up, but it is reasonable to say that we expect one, and we know the scale of our population, so we have no reason not to have significant plans. When the Health Secretary was pushed on it this afternoon, he said that there were plans, but he was less forthcoming on what they were. I am keen for more detail. Whether it was PPE at the early stage of the pandemic or test and trace, frankly, throughout it, such big-scale planning and logistical exercises have not gone flawlessly. Qualifications could be made when they were being done for the first time, but we cannot repeat those mistakes now that we are, I hope, learning from what has happened.

Again, the Health Secretary has talked quite a bit today in the media and the Chamber about the importance of general practice. As I understand it, the BMA’s GP committee, NHS Improvement and NHS England have agreed an enhanced service for general practice to lead this process. That is good. People will want to see this delivered through the NHS rather than a private company, whether because they believe in its efficiency, as I certainly do, or whether in general they think that will reflect best in the population. That is a wise thing to do.

I understand that it is optional for practices to sign up, so may I get more detail from the Minister on that? If take-up is not good enough, will an alteration be considered? I also want to understand what assessment has been made about GPs’ capacity and workload. As I understand it, the programme requires participants to deliver at least 975 vaccinations over a seven-day period from each designated site—that will require 12-hour days seven days a week, including bank holidays. GPs are already busy, so I am keen to know about what assessments have been made about prioritisation.

I do not have enough time to talk about this properly, but I turn finally to the point made clearly by the hon. Members for Henley and for North Herefordshire: we have to come to an equitable settlement globally, too, and to play a leading role in global organisations as we do so.

[Peter Dowd (in the Chair)]

There will be multiple votes in the Chamber shortly. I call the Minister to speak.