Covid 19: Winter Plan

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Tuesday 24th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

Well, I assure my noble friend that the legal consistency of the new tiers—as I said, they are now standardised—will be complemented by targeted communications and public health campaigns to inform and influence behaviours to strengthen the sense of personal responsibility in behaviours that will be important to combat the spread of the virus over the winter, together with using local mass testing programmes, with local knowledge about how to encourage people to use them. All that will lead to the kinds of conversations and messaging that my noble friend talks about.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, does the noble Baroness agree that the public health campaigns she just referred to need also to be targeted at people over uptake of vaccines? Is she concerned about the rise in anti-vaccine sentiment? A UCL survey recently showed that, while 78% of people were willing to get the vaccine, only half considered themselves “very likely to”, with 10% saying that they were “very unlikely to”. There is pernicious anti-vaccine sentiment around. What action will the Government take to deal with it?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

We have a central government unit that will be working on this, but also DCMS is working very closely with social media platforms to help identify false claims, exactly as the noble Lord said, about both the virus and the vaccine and, where necessary, promoting authoritative sources of information in their place. I assure the noble Lord that we are very cognisant of these issues and are working hard to make sure that the rollout of the national vaccination plan is accompanied by a public health strategy and message to make sure that people understand that we will always put the safety of the public first, and that any vaccine that is approved will have gone through an incredibly rigorous process to pass that hurdle, as the noble Lord will well know.