Covid-19 Update

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for raising the point again, and my apologies to the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, for not addressing her point the first time around. I will just say that, from 19 July, it has been voluntary for organisations to use and implement the Covid pass under step 4. There are some essential settings where certification should not be used, and we have made that plain.

However, the Government are encouraging and supporting businesses and large events to use the Covid pass. The Government intend to make full vaccination a condition of entry to nightclubs and other venues where large crowds gather from the end of September. Work is under way to find a solution for Northern Ireland citizens who have been vaccinated in England but are registered with a GP in Northern Ireland. We are also very close to establishing data flows with the Isle of Man.

To the noble Lord’s point about those who have had their vaccinations overseas, in countries such as Norway, he is entirely right. We are working extremely hard on those processes. I have met with NHSX and NHSD to talk about this matter and I assure him that we are putting every effort into dealing with it. I wish that we had dealt with it by now. It is an extremely complex matter. The validation and verification of vaccines requires an enormous amount of bilateral and multilateral co-ordination, and the approval of different vaccines taken by different people in different locations and the record keeping by overseas countries are things that we have to consider and manage. He is right: when the Covid pass system is brought in, those who have had a vaccine overseas will need special consideration. I reassure him that we are working as hard as we can to resolve that issue.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, perhaps I might bring up the subject of antibodies. All the statements seem to be focused completely on vaccinations, yet there is growing evidence that those people who have had Covid and have had vaccinations are indeed almost super-immune even to variants. There was an article in today’s Telegraph about that. So my first question is, do the Government have any idea how many people have in fact had Covid? There are an awful lot of people who have not had symptoms, have been at home, have had it and have recovered, and the Government have not really been informed about it. Is there knowledge in the Government about this area and, if so, is research being done on the strength of the antibodies of those who have had Covid and is that being taken into account in policy?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My noble friend has had an interest in this very important area for some time, and I completely applaud his diligence on it. It is an area that I share an absolute fascination with. We know so much about the vaccines but so little about the body’s immune system. It is incredibly frustrating but it is, I am afraid to say, just one aspect of this pandemic.

To answer the specific question of how many people have had the disease, it is difficult to be precise. Unfortunately, a lot of people have had the disease and never known that they had it. The fact that they have now gone on to have a vaccine means that it is extremely difficult for us to trace whether they have had the disease, because we do it mainly through the counting of antibodies. My noble friend can look on the ONS website, which I am sure he probably has, and he will see that the Venn diagram makes it almost impossible to figure out exactly how many people have had the disease. I can, through correspondence, share with him the various modelling that we have done, but there is not a definitive answer to that question.

I wish it were true that having had the disease and the vaccine together creates some kind of super-immunity, but I am afraid that there is a subset of people who have had both the vaccine and the disease who then go on to have the disease again. I have met a few of those people; they are extremely frustrated, as you can imagine. I am afraid that it does not bode well for thinking that the vaccine presents a concrete and immutable guard against the disease. I am afraid we will be living with the thought of boosters and improvements on the vaccine for some time to come. That is emerging as something we are working on. We are doing a tremendous amount of research on this. I had a meeting earlier with the antibody team, and I reassure my noble friend that we are doing everything we can to understand it better.