Covid-19 Vaccinations: 12 to 15-year-olds

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown Excerpts

Monday 13th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I think it worth reminding the House that ventilation guidance has been there from the very beginning for schools and school leavers to implement, but the roll-out is happening as we speak. Our colleagues in the Department for Education are working right now to get those pieces of equipment into schools as quickly as possible.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

I have great respect for my hon. Friend as the vaccines Minister, but I find what he has announced this evening deeply troubling. I think it will pit parents against parents and parents against teachers, with a poor child stuck in the middle wondering what to do. There will be very little benefit to the child, and there is a lack of long-term data on the potential harm. However, what concerns me above all is that the Gillick doctrine of treating children without parental consent will become the norm for a range of medical procedures.

[Nadhim Zahawi]

Let me, again, slightly push back on that. It is not teachers who are being asked to do this; it is our clinicians, who are well trained and incredibly capable because they do the same thing year in, year out for the purpose of school-age vaccination programmes. They will be offering the vaccines, and ensuring that parents have enough time to read the information and then give their consent before a vaccination takes place.

This is very much not about a situation involving division. I think—I hope—my hon. Friend agrees that throughout the vaccine deployment programme that we began in earnest back on 8 December last year with Pfizer-BioNTech and continued on 4 January with the AstraZeneca vaccine, we have endeavoured never to stigmatise anyone and to provide as much information and transparency as possible, which has led to the highest level of vaccine positivity in the world. I believe that according to the Office for National Statistics data on vaccine positivity in the UK, more than 90% of adults have said that they are very likely to take the vaccine, or have already taken it.