Covid-19: Response and Excess Deaths

Debate between Danny Kruger and Stephen Metcalfe

Thursday 18th April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

May I start by paying tribute to all the Members who have spoken in the debate? I have great respect for them all. It is a particular privilege to follow the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer). He was a hero during the covid period. While so many of us were blindly following what the Government told us to do, he stood almost alone in making up his own mind.

I also acknowledge the leadership of my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope), and the work that he is doing to support the many, many families and people who have suffered adverse reactions, and I am proud to support him in that work. I have great affection and respect for my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Dr Mullan), who is doing a valiant job sticking up for his perspective in this debate. He is sitting directly behind the Minister, so I am not sure whether he is able to speak. None the less, I respect the position that he has taken.

I also wish to acknowledge the work done and the speech made by the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen)—please do not start cheering, because Mr Deputy Speaker will close down the debate. He is not popular with Members on the Conservative Benches, but I think that we have an obligation to take what he says seriously, and to examine the evidence that he has brought to the House. He has an absolute right to make the case that he does in this place.

Finally, before I get on to the points in my speech, let me mention my hon. Friend the Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock (Stephen Metcalfe). He made the essential point that we need more evidence. Fundamentally, we need the Government to be more open, and to instruct the agencies of the Government—the regulator and the health service—to provide the data that we need to get to the bottom of this issue. I implore the Minister to respond to that point in her wind-up.

I disagree with the suggestion from the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire that some fishy business was going on in how the ONS has been calculating excess deaths in recent years. Who knows? Perhaps there is some fishy business going on, but the ONS took the right decision to change the methodology. As Carl Heneghan and others have pointed out, the previous method of accounting for excess deaths—of taking an average over five years—actually led to an exaggeration of excess death numbers during the pandemic and, in a sense, contributed to the great anxiety that many people felt, which encouraged the lockdown, so it is right to rethink how excess deaths are calculated.

We know, by all the different measures, that many more people are dying now than were before the pandemic. That might be accounted for simply by an ageing population, by long covid, or by the effects of an NHS under pressure, but as we have heard today, there is significant evidence that other factors are at play. In particular, the impact on people’s hearts, and increasingly younger people’s hearts, deserves attention. The British Heart Foundation reported last June that since the start of the pandemic, 100,000 more people have died than would have been expected. That is surely significant cause for us to take this question seriously.

The question raised by the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire is whether the vaccines have contributed to this increase in excess deaths. I hesitate to wade into this debate because I am not a scientist. I recognise the point made by others, particularly the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton, that science and politics are uncomfortable bedfellows. We know that there are adverse effects from the vaccination. Everybody acknowledges that; it is a question of the extent to which those effects have been manifested.

My particular concern—this goes back to my point about a request for evidence—is whether the system that oversees the licensing, regulation, monitoring and analysis of medical treatments in general, and vaccines in particular, is up to scratch. There is so much speculation in the debate about what is going on, and what is true and what is not, but we seem to have some facts that we can all agree on. The first, I am afraid, is that the MHRA is significantly deficient in the way it operates. The Cumberlege report—this was referenced in the earlier debate—raised concerns about the way treatments are regulated and licensed that have not yet been addressed. I am afraid that through the covid episode many of the same concerns were manifested in relation to the vaccines.

We now know that the MHRA knew about the effect of the AstraZeneca vaccine on blood clotting as early as February 2021, but issued a warning about that only some months later—in April, a month after other countries had suspended the AZ vaccine. The MHRA also knew about the prevalence of heart problems and myocarditis in February 2021 but did nothing about it until June that year. In the intervening time, millions of people were vaccinated without the knowledge that the MHRA had. As has been said, we found out recently that Pfizer misrepresented the safety and efficacy of the vaccine. There has been very little comeback against it for that, and no meaningful fine. As we heard, just a few thousands pounds were charged in expenses.

The regulatory system that oversees the pharmaceutical companies is surely deeply conflicted, not least due to being partly funded by the pharmaceutical companies that it was set up to represent. It is significant and of concern that they have made so much money out of the vaccines, and so far do not appear to be making due recompense for some of the acknowledged harms— I am not talking about the wilder claims—that their vaccines have been responsible for. Will the Minister enlighten us on whether the indemnities against civil and Government action that the Government awarded to the vaccine manufacturers at the beginning of the production process still apply if it transpires that the companies misled the Government and the public about the safety and efficacy of their product?

The inquiry has been mentioned. There are so many unanswered questions and apparent red flags that it surprises me that the media and Parliament are not more up in arms about excess deaths. I am surprised that more attention is not being paid to this question. The fact is that this scandal—if it is a scandal—suits no one in high places in our country. It is true that we have an inquiry, but as the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton said, surely it is asking the wrong questions. It is very concerning that the module looking at the vaccination programme has been postponed. It strikes me that the inquiry is essentially asking the wrong questions; it is really just asking why we did not do more lockdowns quicker. That seems to be its prevailing question for the experts—not whether the whole response was the right one, and crucially, in the light of what we now know, whether the final response of a mass vaccination programme was as safe and effective as was claimed.

We are rightly proud in this country of the effectiveness, speed and operation of the vaccine production and roll-out. It was a triumph of effective collaboration between Government and the private sector. The operation of the roll-out was a victory that all people can acknowledge, but it is not enough to say that the roll-out was done well. Was it done safely? Did it need to be done on the scale on which it was done? Particularly, did young people need to be vaccinated at all? We all remember Kate Bingham and others saying early on that the vaccine was only for the older population. These questions are increasingly being asked by the public and raised in the media.

Let me conclude quickly with what I have been doing. I hope that we will get more answers from the Minister than I have had so far from the Government. On 17 April 2023—a year ago yesterday—I wrote privately to the Secretary of State, asking him for evidence that justified the Government’s assertion that there was no link between the vaccines and the excess deaths. I did that because I had so much correspondence from people raising that concern. I said:

“I am writing privately in this way rather than raising the question in Parliament because I am determined not to give credence to unscientific, conspiratorial accusations, nor to undermine the vaccination programme in public if it is, indeed, entirely safe and effective.”

I did not want to do this in public; I wanted to give the Government the opportunity to give me the evidence, so that I could pass it back to constituents, but I am afraid that the reply I received from a Minister was the one that we have already heard: the bland assertion that a combination of factors—flu, old age and so on—probably accounts for the excess deaths. The rest of the letter was all about what the Government were doing to combat excess deaths, and the answer was mostly “more vaccines.” I did not think that was good enough.

A year rolled by, the evidence seemed to mount, and more and more people were raising this concern, so I joined the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire, the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer), my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Sir Philip Davies), who could not be here today—he wanted me to explain that he is on important constituency business but is very much here in spirit—and others in writing this time a public letter to the Government asking the same question in more detail. We asked specifically, “What is the evidence for the definitive statement about safety and efficacy?” The Government said:

“There is no evidence linking excess deaths to the vaccine.”

If so, that is great news, but may we have the evidence on which that assertion is based?

Secondly, we asked: “Will the Department for Health, the MHRA, and the UKSHA release the data that is needed to understand what is going on?” The data that we are asking for is already made available privately to pharmaceutical companies for them to use in their safety studies of the vaccine. Why do they get it, but not the public? Why cannot independent scientists look at that data? I am sorry to say that we had replies neither to that letter, which was written in February—here we are in April—nor, after months, to the freedom of information requests that went to the agencies.

[Stephen Metcalfe]

I do not know why the Government would not want to release the data. It may be that the data could be misused and misrepresented. One way around that might be to invite research applications from our very sophisticated research ecosystem. Researchers could be given access to the data if they came forward with particular research projects. They would then be able to report on it, with external verification that they had actually used the data supplied, and not drifted too far from it.

[Danny Kruger]

That sort of practical suggestion should be considered. I would be interested in hearing the Government’s response to that. We are asking for anonymised data that poses no risk to any individuals. If the data is open and public, and the whole purpose is scientific interrogation and analysis, it should not be possible to misuse it. We need as much sunlight on that data as possible.

Let me end by repeating the commitment that I hope we will get from the Minister. I have been asking for anonymised, record-level, official mortality data, including vaccination status. That information, which is already being shared with drug companies, should be shared with Parliament and the public. If that is not possible, could the Minister explain why? Secondly, what are the sources for the definitive statement that the Government have made, most recently in October 2023—and that, I dare say, they might make again today—about there being no evidence of a link between the excess death figures and the covid-19 vaccines? I hope that there is no link. I took the vaccine—at least the first two jabs—as did most of my family and my constituents. I am sure that most people in the Public Gallery took it. We all did. I hope that the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire is wrong to assert that there is a dangerous connection.

I am reluctant to be branded a conspiracy theorist, and I still do not want to give credence to unscientific assertions, but we in this place are here to take risks—the risks of ridicule and contempt—in exchange for the privilege of being here, and I think it is right that we raise these concerns on behalf of the public, even when there is some political cost. Too many people are dying, and we must understand why.