Wednesday 30th December 2020

(3 years, 4 months ago)

Commons Chamber
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Matt Hancock Portrait Matt Hancock
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The Education Secretary is about to make a statement to set out more details, but the armed forces have been brilliant in all sorts of parts of the response to the pandemic, one of which is supporting schools to get mass testing under way in an appropriate way, using the experience they have gained by helping us so much over this crisis.

Diana Johnson Portrait Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab) [V]
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As we have heard, by mid-October more than 600 health and social care staff had already died from covid. Professor Andrew Goddard, the president of the Royal College of Physicians, said today:

“Frontline NHS and care staff must be vaccinated in the next couple of weeks as a priority, as the current pressures on the NHS will be impossible to withstand without a fit and protected workforce”.

With today’s further good news on vaccines, will the Secretary of State give our NHS workforce the undertaking that they will be vaccinated in the next couple of weeks?