Covid-19 Update

Huw Merriman Excerpts

Monday 7th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

There is quite a lot that needs sorting in that. The first thing I would say is that the hon. Lady complains that I acted on Portugal when we saw the data, yet she complains that I did not act on India before we had the data. She cannot have it both ways. She asked me to follow data not dates, but then asked me to prejudge the data by making a decision about 21 June right now. I am a bit confused about that one, too, because I notice that the Scottish Government have themselves been reopening. That is a perfectly reasonable decision for the Scottish Government, but it is a bit rich then for the SNP spokesman to come to this House and have a go at us for deciding to look at the data over the next week, rather than prejudging that decision. It is quite hard to listen and not respond to explain what is actually going on.

The third point I will make is on international vaccination. Absolutely this country has stepped up to the plate. Of the 2 billion doses delivered around the world, half a billion have been the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, which was developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford, with UK taxpayers’ money. It is, as I put it in my statement, a gift to the world. Of course we do not rule out donating excess doses as and when we have them, but only when we have excess doses, and I am sure the hon. Lady will accept that position is agreed not only by the UK Government, but by the devolved Administrations, because we all want to make sure that the people whom we serve get the chance to be vaccinated as soon as possible. That is our approach.

Finally, when it comes to intellectual property, we support intellectual property rights in this country. We could not get drugs to market in the way we manage to without support for intellectual property, because it is often necessary to put billions of pounds into research in order to get the returns over the medium term. What we did, more than a year ago, was agree with Oxford and AstraZeneca that there would be no charge for the intellectual property rights on this vaccine right around the world, and I am delighted that others are starting to take the same approach. Last month, Pfizer announced that in low and lower middle-income countries, it will not charge intellectual property, but we have been on this for more than a year now, so it is a bit rich to hear a lecture from north of the border.

[Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)]

May I ask the Secretary of State about his Department’s role in the latest international travel restrictions? First, what happened to the green watch list, giving more time to prepare for a switch to amber? Did he receive scientific advice that Portugal should be moved to amber, and, if so, will he publish that advice? Has the World Health Organisation recognised the Nepal delta mutation as a variant? Can he confirm that there were just 12 cases of this mutant in Portugal and three times as many in the UK? Ultimately, can he give me a milestone for when we can unlock international travel—perhaps the double-jabbing of over-50s and the clinically extremely vulnerable? Without that milestone, it is difficult to see how we can ever give this industry and workforce hope for their future.

[Matt Hancock]

My hon. Friend rightly asks these important questions about the decisions we had to take on Portugal. The truth is that we acted, yes, on the scientific advice: the advice of the joint biosecurity centre, based on the best information we had about this new variant—so-called delta AW, because it is a variant on the delta variant itself. We took that advice.

Restoring international travel in the medium term is an incredibly important goal that we need to work to. It is going to be challenging and hard because of the risk of new variants, and variants popping up in places such as Portugal that otherwise have a relatively low case rate. But the biggest challenge and the reason this is so difficult is that a variant that undermines the vaccine effort would undermine the return to domestic freedom, and that must be protected at all costs.

Thankfully, the delta variant itself, after two doses, gets effectively the same coverage as the old alpha variant or indeed the original variant, so the fact that that is now dominant in the UK does not put our strategy at risk. It makes it more of a challenge of getting from here to there, but that is a challenge for the decision this week and how we handle things in the short term; it does not put the strategy at risk. A variant that undermined the vaccine fundamentally would put us in a much more difficult place as a country, and that is why we are being as cautious as we are.