Respiratory Syncytial Virus: Immunisation Programme

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Thursday 19th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)]

I am not aware of what the noble Baroness is saying, but I refer back to my earlier answer. This has to be done in an appropriate manner. All due diligence has to be followed, which is why the vaccine is not available for this winter, but we are hopeful that it will be available for winter 2024.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, the Covid pandemic demonstrated clearly that there were differential impacts on different ethnic communities. We know now that black and ethnic-minority communities in this country suffered much more and that there are particular long-term conditions that ethnic-minority community people suffer more acutely from than the white population do. One issue is that insufficient numbers of black and ethnic-minority people are involved in the trialling and testing of vaccines, so the vaccines are frequently not effective in certain of those populations. What are the Government going to do about this?

[Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness. She makes a very good point, and I will feed that specific question back to the department. One thing that we were aware of was that certain communities were not as keen as others to take up the immunisation programme, and a lot of work has been done on that.