Meningitis B Vaccine

Debate between Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and Caroline Ansell

Monday 25th April 2016 Westminster Hall

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

I am delighted to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. I echo a feeling of sympathy for my hon. Friend the Minister, because in a sense she is the meat in the sandwich. Time after time she has to answer such debates, but, as she and the House know—the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) certainly knows this, because he had an Adjournment debate on 7 July 2014 on this subject—there has been an ongoing campaign on this for a long time in the House.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bath (Ben Howlett) is right that meningitis B is a terrible disease that—as other hon. Members have said—comes on suddenly and, at least in the early stages, is often not recognised by health professionals, let alone parents. More publicity should be given to the disease so that people are aware of what to look for. Given that only yesterday I heard a public health advertisement to encourage parents to get their babies vaccinated against MMR, I am not sure why we should not have such a publicity campaign for meningitis B.

The Bexsero vaccine was first licenced by the European Medicines Agency on 1 January 2013. The Minister wrote to me in April 2014 and said that it would be rolled out for children under two months, with a one-off catch-up programme for children born between 1 May 2015 and 30 June 2015. I use that illustratively, because at that stage we did not know when the vaccine was to be introduced. The Minister will say that by 2017 all children under two years will be covered, but if the vaccine had been rolled out at the time of my Adjournment debate, in which we were urging the Minister to do that for all children under one, more children would have been covered. In that debate she said:

“Children aged less than five years are most affected by MenB…the peak of the disease is in infants aged 6 to 12 months.”

She went on to say that

“MenB is fatal for about one in 10 of those who develop meningitis…With early diagnosis and treatment, most people can make a full recovery”.

That is true. She also said:

“Incidence has been decreasing in recent years…but it is unpredictable and it could rise again quickly.”—[Official Report, 7 July 2014; Vol. 584, c. 137.]

The disease has an unfortunate habit of falling and rising in incidence, so it could very well start rising again. The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation set up a working party in 2013—I think in June—to look at vaccinating all children under one year. What has happened to that working party? Have we got the results yet?

This is an unfortunate issue, because as many hon. Members will know—particularly those who have had young children more recently than when my two were youngsters—we often have to take young children to the surgery anyway, so the costs to the NHS of administering the vaccine would be minuscule: just the cost of the drug. There is also a unit cost issue—if GlaxoSmithKline had to make more of the vaccines, presumably the price would come down. I urge the Minister to consider the anxiety that the disease causes and the vast number of people who signed the petition. It was the largest petition ever for such a debate, and I pay great tribute to the House for changing its procedures to introduce such interactive debates so that we can consider the concerns of large numbers of constituents on such issues. I originally got involved in the meningitis B campaign after my constituents, Dr and Mrs Turner, contacted me about their granddaughter, who sadly died from the disease, but it obviously concerns large numbers of constituents.

We should not consider this vaccine as just an issue of cost. We know that the drug is safe. It has been licensed since 1 January 2013 and in the United States, the student cohort at many universities received the vaccine at least two years ago, and it was also trialled in adolescents at a university in this country. It therefore appears to be safe, although the JCVI wants to look at that issue. I say as gently as possible to the Minister that we should not let this be purely an issue of cost. If we have a drug that works—we know it is effective—and it is simply an issue of cost, we should at least consider rolling it out to all babies under one year old and preferably to all children under five.

[Caroline Ansell (Eastbourne) (Con)]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful case for the drug’s safety. We just heard an agonising story from my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) about Charlie and his experience, so does he agree that the cost and suffering of those who survive men B should be factored into the consideration of a catch-up scheme?

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I entirely agree. I will ask the Minister to clarify this, because when I sat down she said sotto voce that it is one year, but my information is that, from when it started, it was for all those under two months of age on 1 September 2015, with a one-off catch-up programme for babies born between 1 May 2015 and 30 June 2015—those who were three or four months of age when the programme was launched. Therefore, while by now it may have nearly spread to one year, that was not the case when it was introduced. We should consider rolling it out definitely to those who are one year old today and preferably to those a little older as well.

I turn to the Department of Health’s cost-effectiveness methodology for immunisation programmes and procurement—the so-called CEMIPP, which is a dreadful acronym. The Minister will tell us that that looks at the life-cost issues, but those who contract meningitis and suffer long-term effects face not just the £30,000 to £40,000 of costs my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) mentioned, but considerable lifelong costs afterwards. The discounting rates, as hon. Friends have said, are particularly mean in that respect, so to look at the issue in the round we must look seriously at the cost to the public purse of not vaccinating. That route could show us more clearly that a roll-out to a larger cohort would be cost-effective.