Covid-19: Brazilian Variant

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, we seem to be devoting a huge amount of state resources to chasing one person with a mutating virus at a time when the National Health Service is on the point of collapse. Waiting lists are going up and we are in a terrible mess. Will the Government accept that viruses mutate and that we need a strategy to deal with that? Constantly locking people up and extending the list of countries so that you can put more and more people into hotels is a self-defeating policy.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

The vaccine is absolutely central to our strategy. It is an approach that has proved enormously popular, and I think I speak for a large number of people when I say that defending the vaccine has to be our number one priority. If there were a highly transmissible vaccine-escaping mutation, it would take us back to the beginning of this whole pandemic. That is why we have put in place red list countries and managed quarantine. That is why we are committed to Operation Eagle and the efforts to track down those bringing variants of concern into this country.