Covid-19 Update

Florence Eshalomi Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

Coventry and Warwickshire have done an amazing job, and I was very pleased to see them top the ranks published on Thursday of the areas of England that have vaccinated the most. I congratulate my hon. Friend and his team.

On foreign holidays, we said in the road map that international holidays will not be allowed before 17 May. We are working with the global travel taskforce, which met this lunchtime, just before I came to the House. It is chaired by my right hon. Friend the Transport Secretary. I am on it, along with Home Office and Foreign Office colleagues and representatives from the travel industry—from the airlines, cruise ships and others. That will report by 12 April. Last year, international travel restrictions were about restricting the number of cases due to high prevalence elsewhere when the prevalence here was low. The challenge now is that we have to take into consideration the risks from variants of concern, which means that more understanding about the impact of vaccines on variants of concern, such as the one first discovered in Manaus in Brazil that we were talking about earlier, is critical to answering the question of when we will be able safely to reopen international travel.

[Florence Eshalomi (Vauxhall) (Lab/Co-op) [V]]

I received some welcome news this morning that Lambeth’s local covid vaccination team is one of the highest performing teams in the country. Our local clinical commissioning group reports that 85% of people over 75 and 89% of residents in care homes have now been vaccinated. Here in Vauxhall, we have had to implement the surge testing operation in the past few days because a case of the South African variant was discovered locally. This is all down to the tireless efforts of our primary care workers, nurses, GPs, pharmacies and an army of volunteers. I am concerned, though, that despite this heroic effort, there is still some misinformation and vaccine hesitancy. Does the Secretary of State agree that more needs to be done to counter this misinformation and to support the vaccine roll-out and take-up among our black, Asian and ethnic minority communities?

[Matt Hancock]

Yes, I do. I want to add one more person to the long list of people whom the hon. Lady rightly thanked for their incredible work of getting take-up in Lambeth to as high as 85% among the over-75s, and that is her. She has played a personal leadership role, and I thank her and pay tribute to her for that. There is still much more work to do, and I hope that we can keep working together on it.