Health: Vaccines
Debate between Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and Earl of Courtown
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the report by the Royal Society for Public Health Moving the Needle: Promoting vaccination uptake across the life course, published on 24 January, what steps they intend to take to counter misinformation about vaccines propagated in social media.
The Earl of Courtown (Con)
My Lords, the United Kingdom has a comprehensive vaccination programme that achieves high uptake nationally. Although there is misinformation about vaccinations circulating on social media, the public have a high level of confidence in the immunisation programme, health professionals and the NHS, and prefer to obtain information from those sources. Public Health England works closely with NHS England to ensure that health professionals and the public have up-to-date, accurate information on the benefits of immunisation.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I welcome the noble Earl to the health brief. There is a little bit of complacency there. He is right that, overall, vaccinations for children are at a high rate but he will know that, in relation to MMR, this is not reaching the levels we would like. Throughout Europe, there have been record outbreaks of measles. This report, which came out a couple of days ago, showed that two out of five parents get highly misleading information on social media; obviously, this has some dampening effect on vaccination uptake. My understanding is that companies such as Facebook and others will not take down wholly inaccurate information in the interests of some kind of spurious balance. Will the Government reconsider their response, show a bit of gumption and take on the social media companies on this?
National Accident Prevention Strategy
Debate between Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and Earl of Courtown
The Earl of Courtown
I sympathise with the noble Lord: four years ago I fell off a ladder while cutting my hedge and ended up in resus with rather a nasty headache. He is quite right—if you look at the pavements around towns and villages there are many trip hazards. Work should be done to improve them.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I take the noble Earl back to his comment that the Government were now considering how to allocate the additional funds for the NHS in light of the announcement this summer. Will he confirm that public health funding through local government has been expressly excluded from that increase in funding, along with education programmes? Can he tell me why?
The Earl of Courtown
The noble Lord knows a great deal more about this subject than I do: I will have to write to him with that information.