Vaccination: Condition of Deployment Debate
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Bob Seely
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Vaccination: Condition of Deployment
Bob Seely Excerpts(2 years, 9 months ago)
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Sajid Javid
The regulators I referred to are independent, so all I can do is ask them to review their regulations. My hon. Friend might be aware that some regulators, such as the General Medical Council, already have requirements for vaccinations in certain settings, which is a decision for them. As he will know, however, the independent regulators usually set out guidance and allow some flexibility in how it is interpreted in certain settings.
Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)
I thank the Secretary of State for this decision. I opposed the policy in December for reasons that have been eloquently laid out by Members such as my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Sir Charles Walker), although I was respectful of the Government’s position. Overall, persuasion is better than coercion, and honesty is better than the manipulative games that we now hear the nudge unit was playing and that were entirely counterproductive. Will the Secretary of State reassure me that, now we have some breathing space, we can do a bit of forward thinking and prepare a plan for this winter that protects the vulnerable and enables the NHS to continue to treat people but does so without resorting to lockdowns? The idea that lockdown is a cost-free, risk-free option is absolutely untrue, as we have now seen from the 100,000 children who have come off school rolls and disappeared. Lockdown carries an extraordinarily heavy price, and frankly a lot of the modelling and forecasting behind it have been extremely flawed.
Sajid Javid
If we look at the experience from the omicron wave, we can see that we had the fewest restrictions on people’s freedom of any large country in Europe, yet we have been the first country to come out of the omicron wave and hit the peak. I believe the main reason for that is that we rightly focused on pharmaceutical defences: vaccines in particular, of course, as well as antivirals and testing. There is a lot to be learned from that.