Vaccination and Public Health

Debate between Dan Poulter and Chris Green

Wednesday 12th June 2019 Westminster Hall

[Chris Green (Bolton West) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered vaccination and public health.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies, and a particular pleasure to participate in a debate on health with my near neighbour and hon. Friend the Member for South Ribble (Seema Kennedy) for the first time in her new position as Minister.

Vaccination and public health is an immensely important area not only for the UK, but across the world, and vaccination has contributed so much to our public health. It is a pleasure to open this debate, following on from a Westminster Hall debate that I recently secured on clinical trials. It highlights the UK’s strength in the life sciences sector, not only in the companies and corporations involved, but in the importance of our medical research charities and the academics who work in the sector. In this area, we truly are a world leader.

Some of the concerns that I highlighted about clinical trials also feed into this debate. Fundamentally, it is about saving millions of lives every year, and with immunisation we can also eradicate diseases. The World Health Organisation declared in 1980 that it had eliminated smallpox, a terrible disease that killed a great many people and left survivors with terrible afflictions throughout their lives. I suppose the most famous example of a smallpox sufferer was Queen Elizabeth I.

In 1796—we were a little bit behind the Chinese; I think the first example of Chinese inoculation was about 1,000 years ago—Edward Jenner in Gloucestershire and others noticed that milkmaids caught cowpox, but milkmaids who caught cowpox did not catch smallpox. When that was identified, Edward Jenner inoculated James Phipps, the eight-year-old son of his gardener, and that inoculation protected James Phipps from smallpox. Since then, the World Health Organisation and health organisations around the world have targeted smallpox with such amazing success that the terrible disease has been defeated and eradicated.

Immunisation speaks to something that is increasingly important and increasingly recognised in the national health service: maintaining one’s health rather than having something go wrong and then repairing the damage. It is about asking, “What can we do to keep fit, keep active, avoid excesses in one regard or another and maintain our health?” It is so much cheaper, more effective and better for our standard of living to maintain our health than it is to lose our health and try to regain it. It is also immensely cost-effective; like all organisations, the national health service is under resource pressure, and, in terms of both direct and indirect costs, immunisation is reckoned to provide a saving of £13 for every £1 spent.

In the United Kingdom, we do well on immunisation. The population of the UK is well informed and well educated on immunisation, which leads to a high take-up of those vaccinations; but we cannot rest on our laurels. In 2017-18, there was a 91% take-up of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccination in England, the lowest since 2011-12.

It is reckoned that, in order to have herd immunity, an immunisation take-up rate of 95% is needed. A 95% uptake protects the remaining 5% of people who, for whatever reason, fall through the gaps, do not take the immunisation or perhaps move to the UK after missing the opportunity. England is falling behind the rest of the United Kingdom; in the rest of the UK, the take-up rate is 3% higher than it is in England, and it is important that we close that gap.

Media, and particularly social media, present a problem. When we look at the information that is available, we can see that it is easy for scare stories to develop in the media or to be perpetuated on social media. When stories or misleading ideas not backed by any evidence get out of hand and people buy into them, it is very important that they are challenged.

A sense of solidarity is also important. It is very difficult if a number of people think, “I am concerned about the risk of this immunisation, so I will rely on the 95% of other people to have their children immunised and I will be part of the 5% who are otherwise protected.” We cannot rely on everyone else to do the right thing, because the proportion of people who do not take up the immunisation may increase to more than 5%.

[Dr Dan Poulter (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate and calling out the frankly irresponsible behaviour of some in the anti-vaccination movement. Does he agree that it is particularly important that mothers get their children inoculated with the MMR vaccine, because otherwise they are potentially putting at risk not just their own children, but other mothers whom those children may come into contact with, who may develop measles, mumps or rubella—all of which can be very harmful to a developing foetus and to mothers in pregnancy?

[Chris Green]

I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend. When I was young, I had both chickenpox and measles. At that time, it was part of growing up, and many people who have had those diseases think, “It’s not a big thing; it’s not a big problem.” However, serious health outcomes or problems can develop from diseases that people may dismiss as not being terribly important. In that sense, solidarity is vital; we must all take responsibility not only for ourselves and our own families, but for the wider community.

Media and social media concerns are just one factor. There are a number of other barriers to achieving comprehensive vaccination. The World Health Organisation highlights vaccine hesitancy, and identifies three Cs: confidence, complacency and convenience. Is it convenient to have the vaccination? Are people confident or complacent about take-up, with a sense of, “I’ll be one of the 5%,” or, “It’s not really a problem in our society; the treatment isn’t actually dealing with a significant problem”? Or do people think that the disease has gone the way of smallpox and been effectively eradicated? That is not the case, especially given the ease with which people can travel across the world.

The UK is a leader in what we do here, but our support for countries around the world is also incredibly important. Support for funding the Department for International Development is often challenging, but I think there will be pretty much universal support for the announcement earlier this year of the £10 million to develop vaccines against global infectious diseases. That came on the back of the Ebola crisis in west Africa, where 11,000 people were killed, and it goes into a wider fund of £120 million committed to infectious diseases. The UK is the single largest contributor to Gavi, contributing a quarter of its funding and saving hundreds of thousands of lives around the world.

The UK also has an important role to play in co-ordinating and helping other countries. If another country does not have the health infrastructure that we have, they will need that support—that was the case in the Ebola example in west Africa—and we can lend our expertise. I reiterate that with flights from west Africa to the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, the transition of easily communicable diseases is a significant risk.