Andrew Murrison
Main Page: Andrew Murrison (Conservative - South West Wiltshire)Department Debates - View all Andrew Murrison's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(3 years, 6 months ago)
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Matt Hancock
Being certified as having had a vaccine includes being on a vaccine clinical trial. The deputy chief medical officer, Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, has written to participants in vaccine clinical trials, who are doing, as my right hon Friend says, a great service to their country and indeed to the world by offering themselves to have an unlicensed vaccine in order to check that it works. I am very grateful to all of them. We will not put them in a more difficult position because of that.
We will make sure that when it comes to someone proving that they have been certified as vaccinated, being on a clinical trial counts as certified and continues to count as certified during a grace period after they are unblinded, so that if they are in the placebo arm, they can get both jabs and will not be disadvantaged for being on the clinical trial. That is a very important point. I am very glad that right hon. Friend raises it. If anybody from any part of the House gets that question from a constituent, please point them to the comprehensive letter by Professor Jonathan Van-Tam that explains and reassures.
Dr Murrison
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. May I commend him for the efforts he has put in to keeping colleagues informed and responding to their questions along the way? It has been extremely good. Can I press him on this two-week break point that he and the Prime Minister have referred to? What underpins that? Is it simply a desire to get through a certain number of vaccinations—a figure that he presumably already knows? Or is it uncertainty over the data as it currently exists, because if it is, and given that this should be led by the data, there is every likelihood that in the next few days, we will get some indication as to whether the increase in the delta variant incidence is being translated into intensive care unit admissions and deaths? Can he give me and others considering how to vote this evening any comfort on that two-week point? If we have the sense that there may indeed be a genuine break at that point—if those cases do not translate into deaths or ICU admissions—we will be a little more comfortable.
Matt Hancock
As so often, my right hon. Friend, who is one of the most astute medical practitioners in this House—crikey, I could get myself into trouble there, because all the medical practitioners in this House are astute, but he is also a public health expert. I will start again. My right hon. Friend’s point was a really good one and very astute. He is exactly right about our approach: the two-week review is a data review.
Up to around 10 days to a week before the decision making cut-off for the proposal to take step 4 on 21 June, it looked like hospitalisations were staying flat, despite rising case rates. We did not know whether that was because of a lag or because there was now going to be no cases turning into hospitalisations. That remains the case now for the link to the number of people dying, because the number of people dying each day in England is actually slightly falling at the moment—thank goodness —and there has not been a rise in the number of deaths following the rise in the case rates, which started about three weeks ago. Within a couple of weeks, we will know whether that continues to be flat or whether it rises a little. It has risen a little in Scotland; I just put that warning out there. That is precisely the sort of data that we will be looking at at the two-week point. We have been absolutely clear that the goal on which we hang the decision ahead of 19 July is one of delivering the vaccines, and we have a very high degree of confidence that we can deliver the vaccines that we think are needed in order to be able to take step 4 on 19 July.
I hope that was a clear and comprehensive answer, once I untangled myself from my initial response to my right hon. Friend.
Jonathan Ashworth
Even though we will find ourselves in different Lobbies this evening, I think there is more in common between us than perhaps one might expect. I do not want restrictions to remain in place for any longer than they need to. I want to move to a system where we are trying to push down covid infection rates by, yes, rolling out vaccination as far and as fast as possible to everybody, but also putting in place the proper framework so that those who are ill or a contact of someone who has been ill with covid is able to isolate themselves.
We still have a culture in this country of soldiering on; the Secretary of State has referred to it in the past. I dare say that it is true of many of us in this Chamber. I have certainly done it in the past 20 years of my working life. I have gone into work with a sore throat or feeling under the weather, thinking I will just have some paracetamol and get on with it. Things like this have got to change, because although that sore throat may well have been fine for me, we now understand in great detail that it could have been very dangerous for others. We have to change our attitudes. However, there will still be a lot of people who have to go to work because they cannot afford to stay at home, so we need decent sick pay sorted out. One of the things that was revealed in this morning’s Politico email was the leak of a Government document that said that the isolation system is still not effective. That is because we still do not pay people proper sick pay. This is going to become more of an issue because presumably Test and Trace is to stay in place for the next year or so, as my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) indicated. People who have had two jabs and are asked to isolate themselves will ask themselves, not unreasonably, “If I have had two jabs, why do I need to isolate myself?” This is going to become much more of a challenge and we will need proper sick pay in place.
Let me finish dealing with the point made by the hon. Member for Winchester. I want us to control the virus by doing things such as proper sick pay, proper ventilation support, and investing properly in public health systems and local primary care systems. One of the things we know about this virus is that, like flu, it disproportionately hits the poorest and the disadvantaged because they are the people who have to go to work or the people in those communities where significant long-term conditions such as diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease tend to cluster. That often makes those people more vulnerable to these types of respiratory viruses.
Dr Murrison
On the subject of the poorest and most disadvantaged, what does the right hon. Gentleman then make of the recent observation by the chief medical officer on the annual toll taken by the ill effects of smoking? He said that because he wanted to compare and contrast the number of people that we are losing, sadly, to covid with those we lose every single year to the ill effects of smoking. We have been prepared to countenance some swingeing restrictions on all our liberties for the past 15 months; banning smoking, for example, would be far less restrictive by comparison. It is smoking that is driving up health inequalities, but I have not heard him comment on that yet.
Jonathan Ashworth
I have not commented on it in my remarks so far, but I have commented on it in the past and I absolutely agree with the right hon. Gentleman. We need to do more to drive down smoking rates, we need to do more to deal with alcohol abuse and we need to do more with the fact that too many of us eat food that is high in salt and sugar. I am prepared to work with the Government to be more interventionist on these matters. I would look at levies and taxes on tobacco companies, and I would invest more in anti-smoking and public health facilities locally, some of which have been cut back, sadly, because the public health grant has been cut back. So yes, I completely agree with the right hon. Gentleman.
Dr Murrison
With respect, the right hon. Gentleman has missed the point. Perhaps I did not make myself clear enough. The chief medical officer was introducing that because he was trying to explain that we are going to have to live with some level of risk. We need to have a discussion about the public’s appetite for risk if we are to live with covid. The reason he cited smoking and the figure of 90,000 a year is that it approximates to the number of people we have lost from covid so far in this pandemic. Does the right hon. Gentleman not agree that we need to have a discussion about where we are prepared to pitch this? Is it 22,000, which is the figure for a bad flu year? Is it 90,000, which is the number we lose every single year from the ill effects of smoking?