Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (All Tiers) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2021

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Monday 8th February 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, from the cheap seats at the far end, I pay a warm tribute to my right honourable friend the Prime Minister for his masterful handling of the vaccination drive. As the NHS called me a critically endangered species, I had my jab last Thursday night and I am in no doubt that it was months ahead of where it would have been were it not for the brilliant handling of vaccination by the Government.

It has been a textbook operation. The Prime Minister gave Kate Bingham the order: “Stop people dying”. She formed a task force that rapidly decided the best vaccines to back and funded their production, bypassing NHS bureaucracy. It was based on scientific judgment, not just buying up everything in sight. The Secretary of State for Health told Oxford University to dump Merck and go with AstraZeneca. That was inspired. It was a masterstroke for which he deserves the highest praise. Then the logistics were fine-tuned, with Professor Van-Tam apparently demanding freezers way back last June. Then contracts for vaccine supply were signed three months ahead of other countries.

I also thank the Prime Minister for getting us out of the slow-moving EU oil tanker. What a perfect description of the EU—a lumbering monster, unable to move quickly and full of last century’s concept of power. If we had stayed in then there is no way we would have approved the emergency use of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Theoretically, of course, we could have, but a vote to remain would have made us a very tame, subservient puppet, afraid to do anything on our own. We would also have been trapped into the corrupt EU purchasing racket, paying for French Sanofi vaccines that have not yet been invented. Little did we know four years ago that leaving the EU could save thousands of British lives or we would probably have put that on the side of the bus as well.

While the NHS staff, the military, the volunteers and others are doing a fantastic job of sticking needles in people’s arms, there would be nothing much to inject if it were not for the leadership, judgment and far-sightedness of the Prime Minister, Ministers and all in the Government. Thank you, Prime Minister, personally—the Boris haters will have to gnash their teeth a while longer.

I have a couple of ethical and moral questions to pose to my noble friend, but I do not want answers today. It seems that we will have tens of thousands of vaccine refuseniks. I defend their absolute right not to be vaccinated, so long as they respect my right to get hospital treatment ahead of them if they catch Covid. Hundreds of thousands of people with all other life-threatening illnesses—cancer, heart conditions and so on—have had their treatment postponed to give priority to Covid cases. That may have been the right thing to do when there was no cure for Covid, but now that there is a vaccine it will be intolerable if honest patients who have been vaccinated cannot get into hospital because refuseniks are blocking beds. My message is simple: if you refuse vaccination and catch Covid, then tough luck. You have absolutely no right to displace from a hospital bed a decent patient who has been vaccinated. No matter your colour, ethnicity or age, if you refuse vaccination you forfeit the right to jump the hospital queue.

Related to that, I assume that if, for example, care home or medical staff wandered round the wards, smoking 40 cigarettes a day they would be dismissed on the spot. Therefore, if medical or care home staff refuse vaccinations and wander round wards, belching out Covid all day, which is 100 times more lethal than passive smoking, should they not be considered to be sacked on the spot as well? I simply leave that for consideration.

Finally, we are repeatedly told that we must not call it the Chinese virus, but the variants are called the South African, Brazilian, Kent and UK variants. It simply identifies where they came from or were discovered. China is directly responsible for more than 2 million dead in the world. Since China let this virus escape from its Wuhan lab, covered it up and lies about it every single day, is it not about time that we called it by its true name—the China virus?