Covid-19 Update

Jeremy Hunt Excerpts

Tuesday 10th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

I am very grateful to the hon. Member for his questions and for the approach that he is rightly taking. Like him, I am delighted that we are able to roll-out routine testing to NHS staff. That starts today. I am grateful to him for his support and I am grateful for the support and the urging of the Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt).

On contact tracing, we continue to work on the constant improvement needed, but, as the hon. Member said, the expansion of testing in a radical way because of the new technology that we have invested in and spent months working on, means that we will now be able to find more of the primary cases and more of the people who have the disease and then will be able to get them and their contacts to isolate. The single most important challenge is finding the people who have the virus in the first place.

The hon. Member mentioned children. The vaccine will not be used for children. It has not been tested on children. The reason is that the likelihood of children having significant detriment if they catch covid-19 is very, very low. This is an adult vaccine for the adult population.

He asked about the JCVI prioritisation. It is really important that we prioritise according to clinical risk. The JCVI has looked into all the risk factors, including ethnicity. It has concluded that age and whether a person works in health and social care are the two prime risk factors, which far outweigh any other, and so they are the primary risk factors that cascade into the draft interim prioritisation that it published on 25 September, which of course will be updated as it gets the final data that comes through from the clinical trials.

He asked about the proportion of the population that needs to be vaccinated. The honest truth to that question is that we do not know what proportion of the population the vaccination needs to reach in order for it to stop the epidemic. The reason we do not know that is that a clinical trial can check for the impact of the vaccine on protecting the individual—43,000 individuals, half of whom have had the vaccine. What cannot be checked is the impact on the transmission of the disease by those people, because a significant proportion of the population have to have had the vaccination to understand that. That is the difference between a so-called disease-modifying vaccine, which tests how much it affects the disease that an individual suffers if they get covid-19, versus an epidemic-modifying vaccine, which is about the impact on the spread and transmission of the disease. We cannot know that until after the vaccine has been rolled out, so we will monitor that very closely.

The hon. Gentleman asked about manufacture, which is important, and for this vaccine that is a matter for Pfizer. It is a difficult process. Distribution is also a huge challenge, and that is being led by the NHS. Because the vaccine must be stored at minus 70° until the final hours, the cold-chain requirements are significant and add to the logistical complications. However, we have known about that cold-chain requirement for many months, and it has been part of our planning for some time. We have a good degree of confidence that that will be in place.

Finally, the hon. Gentleman asked about international collaboration. I am delighted that the UK has been a leader in efforts for international collaboration to find a vaccine. It has put in more money than any other nation, co-ordinating and bringing together scientists and vaccine specialists, and using our aid budget to ensure that people around the world get the vaccine in countries that, in some cases, could not afford to vaccinate their own population. We are a big part of the international work, and I very much look forward to working with colleagues in the United States, and everywhere else around the world, to ensure that we have a global vaccination programme as soon as a safe and effective set of vaccines can be made available.

[Jeremy Hunt (South West Surrey) (Con)]

I warmly congratulate the Health Secretary on securing access to the new vaccine. Choosing which vaccine to back must be a bit like playing roulette, and to secure 40 million doses of the first vaccine to prove efficacious is an enormous achievement for the country. He deserves great credit for that. I also thank him for bringing forward the introduction of weekly testing of NHS staff to the end of next week. That will reassure our very hardworking front-line staff that they are not infecting their patients, which is one of their primary worries.

The biggest issue we now face is the fact that only around one-fifth of those who we ask to isolate comply with that, and we do not even know all the people who we would like to isolate. What does the Secretary of State think of Sir John Bell’s suggestion to the Health and Social Care Committee this morning that, instead of asking people to isolate, we should give them 48-hour lateral flow tests, and ask them to isolate only if they are positive?

[Matt Hancock]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. He is generous with his words. I also direct his warm words of gratitude to the vaccine’s taskforce, which has done so much work to ensure that we procure and secure the supplies of these vaccines, should they prove safe as well as efficacious. On Sir John Bell’s comments, that option of testing people regularly—not if they are a primary case and have the virus, but if they are a contact—would not be open to us had we not secured the huge capacity for lateral-flow testing that we now have in this country. I very much look to clinicians for advice. Sir John Bell is a highly respected clinician and expert in this area, and I am sure that everybody will want to look closely at that issue.