Covid-19 Update

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[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.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I come back to the advice from the JCVI relating to 12 to 15 year-old children who do not suffer the underlying conditions it has set out. I worry about the implications of that being overruled through the process that the Ministers have set up, seeking the advice of the four Chief Medical Officers. The Minister will know that they concluded that some young people, although it would be extremely rare, could suffer from myocarditis with lifelong consequences.

I must ask about the ethical considerations here as to some young people who will be damaged as a result of that decision because 6 million adults are too stupid or ignorant to have the vaccination. That surely is where our focus should be. Could he say something about what the Government are doing? Does he agree that the integrity of the whole vaccine process, not just in relation to Covid, is at stake here? I think that the JCVI should be listened to.