Covid-19: Vaccinations and Global Public Health

Lord Hussain Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hussain (LD)]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords for allowing me to speak in the gap. I have a particular issue to share with the House. I have just come back from a red-list country, Pakistan. I would like to share my experience. The region I went to is Azad Kashmir, where the majority of the people who are known to be British Pakistanis come from. They keep going back and forth to that area.

You cannot leave this country to go to Pakistan until you are vaccinated and until you have a test proving that you are negative. Of course, once you get there, they test you again. While I was there I witnessed the vaccination programme in the area. It was widely accepted, with people queueing up every day outside vaccination centres. Vaccination is down to school-age children now. People are really encouraging all ages to have the vaccination done.

Also, I have to say something about the local government I saw, with local lockdowns and national lockdowns. My wife and I went to see my elderly in-laws many times—we were in a village—but whenever we wanted to go out for shopping, we were told, “No, there is a lockdown. You can’t go”. So, there is a heavy lockdown in the country. In Azad Kashmir, including in the Mirpur district and the surrounding areas, I did not hear about many deaths from Covid-19, and the hospitals were not full of Covid-19 patients either. That is where the majority of British Pakistanis are travelling to and from.

My experience was also this. Obviously, we could not return without showing a certificate of vaccination and tests. Here, getting from the aeroplane—that is, from the minute the flight landed at the airport—to getting to the hotel, all in London, took nearly seven hours. It was tortuous, and it cost me and my wife £2,300. Yes, we were able to pay, and did pay, but what about those families who have three or four members with them, perhaps elderly relatives or children?

Not only that, let me share my particular experience of when we got to the hotel. Only a few minutes later, a piece of paper came through the door saying, “We do apologise but the hot water doesn’t work in the hotel. We are working on it”. The hot water did not come back for another 18 hours. This is the kind of experience that people are going through. What I am saying is that, if we have to have certain countries on red lists for whatever reason, let us make sure that we force to quarantine in hotels only those who test positive. Otherwise, we are pushing planeloads of people who are not positive into hotels where it costs them a lot of money to go through this tortuous experience.

I beg the Government to look at this from a humanitarian point of view. Please, do something about it. I do not know how long this is going to go on for but it is affecting ordinary people quite a lot.