Liam Fox
Main Page: Liam Fox (Conservative - North Somerset)Department Debates - View all Liam Fox's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(3 years, 6 months ago)
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Matt Hancock
Yes, I would characterise it in that way. Our goal, ahead of 19 July, is to take step 4. On the basis of the evidence so far, I am confident that we will not need more than the four weeks to get this job done and take step 4.
Dr Liam Fox (North Somerset) (Con)
Can my right hon. Friend give us a little more information about the rise in hospitalisations that he mentioned? Of those who are being hospitalised, how many are in the younger age group who were not yet eligible for the vaccine, and how many are above that age—in other words, those who were able to get the vaccine but chose not to?
Matt Hancock
My right hon. Friend makes a really important point. The answer is that the majority are in the younger age group who have not yet had the chance to be vaccinated. Just under one fifth of those going into hospital in the last week have had both jabs, about a fifth have had one jab and the majority have not had any. The majority are under the age of 50 and have not yet had the opportunity to have both jabs. I think there is a material difference when it comes to the state’s responsibility to offer the vaccine to all adults. The duty that we have when somebody has not been offered the vaccine is greater than the duty we have when we have offered a vaccine but somebody has chosen not to take it up. There is a material difference between those two situations that I think my right hon. Friend was getting at.
Dr Liam Fox (North Somerset) (Con)
I am afraid that the previous speaker will be very disappointed, because we are going to have to live with covid, like we have to learn to live with every other infectious disease that exists in the world. Yes, we have tried to suppress it. Yes, we tried to deal with it, but we will have to learn to live with it. Viruses, the hon. Member may be surprised to know, have been around for 400 million years—a lot longer than us. Guess which one is winning the Darwinian race.
When we do have to make decisions, I think one thing is very clear. Up to this point, the aims of the medical profession and the Government’s advisers and the aims of the Government have been broadly similar, but they will have to diverge at some point, because the medical profession will always want to see the rate of infection brought down to the smallest level possible at whatever cost, but the Government have different considerations. The Government need to ensure that the rest of the health service is able to operate properly, that the economy is moving and that the social and wellbeing aspects of the population are looked after. That is why the aims are different.
While I am at it, on a private note, I am sick to death of the Government’s so-called advisers coming on TV and giving their individual views, rather than giving advice to the Government on a confidential basis. If they want to be stars of Sky News, let them leave SAGE and carve their own path.
On what basis will we decide when we have this divergence? The first thing to say is that the variant will not be a reason for keeping lockdown. The variant may be more transmissible, but that is irrelevant if it is not causing more hospitalisations or more deaths. We have already heard from Public Health England that the two vaccines—Pfizer and AstraZeneca—can cope as well as with the new Indian variant as they can with the Kent variant. We do not need to hear about the variant argument, because I do not think it holds water.
What matters is who is being hospitalised, and where. Are the hospitalisations young people who have not yet had the vaccine, who may be at risk because of the increased transmissibility of the new variant, or is it people, as we have seen in some parts of the country, who have been offered the vaccine, but for one reason or another have chosen not to get it? We cannot have the country being held to ransom by any groups who have been offered a vaccine but have chosen not to take it; that is utterly unacceptable.
It seems to me that the essence of the Government’s case—if the Minister for Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood (Edward Argar), wants to, he can intervene to confirm it—is this: the Government’s strategy was based on a single vaccine strategy, in the belief that, if enough people got it, the efficacy would be high enough that we could unlock at that point. However, the evidence published by Public Health England yesterday showed that the Pfizer vaccine is 94% effective against hospitalisation after one dose, but that AstraZeneca is only 71% after one dose and takes the second dose to get up to 92%.
It seems to me that the Government are telling us— I wish they would be clear about this—that they need a little more time to get people, especially those on AstraZeneca, to the second dose so that there is the level of protection against hospitalisation that we see with the Pfizer vaccine. If the Government presented their case in that way, it would be an awful lot easier for the rest of us to give the Government our support, because that would be a clear rationale.
We also need a clear assurance that the two-week review point is not a ploy to buy support in the House of Commons, but a genuine review of the data, whereby we will see within a couple of weeks whether the hospitalisation rate is increasing or not. If the Government give us a clear assurance that the two-week point is a real review and that we can achieve the full relief of the lockdown at that point, the Minister might be able to buy a little support from his own Benches this evening.
Neale Hanvey (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (Alba) [V]
It feels like we have entered yet another episode of “Hancock’s Half Hour”, but unfortunately it is laughable for all the wrong reasons.
The first motion under debate today is indirectly relevant to Scotland and to my Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath constituency. Without independence, Scotland will continue to suffer the consequences of the UK Government’s hapless leadership on covid. Travel agencies in my constituency have another month of pouring money down the drain and another month with no tangible support from the Government. The first motion is England only, so Alba Members will abstain on that principle, but to those who have suffered loss of life and bereavement, the Government’s response of repetitious, braggadocious claims at every juncture must be disheartening. It is more indicative, as I said earlier today, of a Del Boy Britain: “Everything will be fine because we’re British.” But it is precisely why we find ourselves in this position.
This Government have put political priorities over public safety. There was a lack of action on border control at the start of pandemic and with the identification of the delta variant. They have allowed new variants to enter and seed, and the weekend’s failure by the UK Prime Minister to lead the G7 to invest in vaccines and cash in line with the World Health Organisation’s identified need is absolutely unforgivable.
There has been an unwillingness to listen, to learn and to respond; chaotic messaging; and the abandonment of testing in March 2020, instead of using that nadir of the pandemic to expand testing. The Secretary of State has continued with his overconfidence in in-the-field lateral flow test devices, and the chaotic education policy has only made things worse. There are continued huge gaps in support, driving poverty and disadvantage in the face of repeated warnings. These are not just my concerns; many have been raised in the prestigious British Medical Journal.
Not every misstep can be mitigated by the effective work of Kate Bingham’s vaccines taskforce. Recently, the Secretary of State supported my calls for surveillance across a range of indicators to beat the virus, but vaccines are not foolproof.
The G7 chair opportunity was an unforgivable moral failure. Vaccines, cash, but also robust international surveillance, are urgently required. The Government’s growing propensity to ignore scrutiny of Parliament is absolutely staggering, and now the right hon. Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) derides scrutiny of experts in the media. It has been never clearer than with their vote-dodging reduction in overseas aid and that will not be forgiven.
This is a global and dynamic challenge. The completely inadequate response from the G7 summit risks the development of ever more virulent variants. In the light of that failure in leadership from the Prime Minister, can we get some straight answers—probably not? What action is the Secretary of State taking to secure our public health by working to meet those WHO targets for vaccines, cash and surveillance? Any return to normality will happen only when we are all safe.
Dr Fox
On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. Would it be possible for you to convey to Mr Speaker that, while we are still operating under the restrictions that we have in Parliament, we need to try to find ways to intervene on contributions that are being made on video? Otherwise, we are unable to challenge the views of the Scottish nationalists, who claim that the problems that they suffer from in the covid pandemic are a result of the United Kingdom Government’s actions, when they themselves have the same powers to deal with them in Scotland, had they chosen to do so differently, but they have not.