Covid-19 Vaccine Update

Jeremy Hunt Excerpts

Thursday 4th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his constructive way of engaging with the vaccination deployment programme. On trials, we have two running currently, both with Public Health England. The Vivaldi trial is testing residents of care homes, who were in category 1 of the JCVI categories. The second is Siren, which is testing frontline health workers, who are in category 2. As Jonathan Van-Tam, the deputy chief medical officer, has said, we will know the infection and transmission data from those trials in the next few weeks. Of course, the Oxford data is very promising—it needs to be peer reviewed—but those trials will also capture the Oxford vaccine, because obviously that came on site in January.

On the priority list, the JCVI looked very closely at both black, Asian and minority ethnic and, of course, other considerations, including by profession, and came down clearly on the side of age as the deciding factor in people’s risk of dying from covid. This is a race against death, hence the nine categories, which we are going through, and we will continue to do so. A number of professions will be captured in those categories. Of course, those with extremely severe illness will be captured in the category for the severely extremely vulnerable, and others will be captured in further categories down the phase 1 list.

I certainly think it would be wrong to change the JCVI recommendation, because categories 1 to 9 account for 99% of mortality. When we get into phase 2, we would welcome a debate and, of course, will ask the JCVI about including professions such as teachers, shop workers and police officers, who through their work come into contact with much greater volumes of the virus than others do, and it will advise us accordingly.

On BAME and ethnicity, the NHS now collects such data, and we are publishing it. We are doing an enormous amount of work not only across Government, but with the NHS, to ensure that we bring in local government so that we can begin to share data. I would welcome us working much closer with local government and the NHS so that we can identify, to the individual level, the people we need to protect as soon as possible.

I put it on the record that I want clinical commissioning groups to share data with MPs. Several colleagues—[Interruption.] Including you, Madam Deputy Speaker; I can see you nodding away vigorously. CCGs should and must engage with local politicians, because MPs get a lot of emails and telephone calls from concerned constituents in the top four most vulnerable categories. Of course, the NHS has plans to publish CCG-level data very soon.

As for care home staff, we had a fantastic response through the care home vaccination programme, which is category 1, and we continue to do more with staff to encourage them to be vaccinated, because we make four visits into care homes. Visit one is for the first dose, visit two is to try to vaccinate those who may have been infected the first time, because people cannot be vaccinated until after 28 days, visit three will be for second doses, and so on. We are getting greater traction with care home staff, but the hon. Gentleman is right to mention that. There is a big focus on helping them to go to hospital hubs and, of course, their primary care networks.

On the second dose, everyone who has had a first dose of Pfizer will get a second dose of Pfizer within that 12-week dosing period. That will begin in March in the usual way that the NHS does vaccinations. Everyone who has had a first dose of Oxford-AstraZeneca will get a second dose of Oxford-AstraZeneca within 12 weeks as well.

The hg is right to ask about people wanting the option of going either to a national vaccination centre or to the PCN. If right hon. and hon. Members have particular cases, please point them to us and we will do everything we can to ensure that that is facilitated.

The hon. Gentleman rightly highlighted HIV clinics. I will take that matter away and see whether there is a workaround for those who want to have that information remain private from their GP. We will see what we can do.

This is World Cancer Day, and there is now real excitement in the scientific community in the UK about the messenger RNA vaccine, because people can begin to think about vaccines for cancers as well. However, the hon. Gentleman raises an important point about those who care for the clinically extremely vulnerable, and we want to ensure that we deliver the JCVI phase 1 and then very quickly reach the rest of the population.

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

I congratulate the Minister on his leadership of the vaccine roll-out programme, which really is one of the most impressive anywhere in the world. Indeed, I also commend the Health Secretary for the foundations that he laid last year.

Now that we know that mutations and variants are the name of the game, I want to ask the Minister about a worst-case scenario: a variant that is wholly immune to the vaccines that we are currently distributing. How possible is it that we could see that in the next few months in the UK? Has the Manaus variant, which people are particularly worried about, arrived here from Brazil? If we did see such a variant, what is the timescale not just to develop a new vaccine that works against it, but to manufacture it and get it approved by regulators so that it is ready to go?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I am grateful to the Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee for his question, and he is absolutely right. The manufacturers are already working on variants to their vaccine to take into account the mutation of the virus. Viruses will mutate to survive and this virus is no different. There are about 4,000 mutations now around the world, some more concerning than others. We have, in the United Kingdom, a genome sequencing industry that is a world leader—about 50%, or just under, of the sequencing has taken place in the United Kingdom. Not only are we working with the current manufacturers—Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca and Moderna —that have been approved, but we are also looking at how we can make sure that we make the most of the new messenger RNA technology, which allows the rapid development of vaccine variants that will then deal with the virus variants as rapidly as possible. When I spoke to the Science and Technology Committee a few weeks ago, I said that we were planning to have in place the ability to go from the moment that we can sequence a variant that we are really concerned about to the moment that we can have a vaccine ready in between 30 to 40 days, with then, of course, the manufacturing time.

We have invested in Oxfordshire, in the Vaccines Manufacturing and Innovation Centre, and in the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult Manufacturing Innovation Centre in Braintree—£127 million there and just shy of £100 million in Oxfordshire—to be ready to manufacture any vaccine that we would need. The Prime Minister, of course, also visited those making what I refer to as our seventh vaccine, the Valneva vaccine. That is a whole inactivated virus, so it does not just work on the spikes in the way that the two current vaccines that we are deploying work. It works on the whole of the virus, which is much more likely to capture any mutations from the spikes and therefore be incredibly effective. We have invested in that production facility in Scotland so that we can have that vaccine as a future-proofing of annual vaccination strategies or a booster in the autumn, if necessary.