HPV Vaccinations

Debate between Maria Miller and Paul Beresford

Wednesday 19th July 2023 Westminster Hall

[Dame Maria Miller (in the Chair)]

As all parties are present, we will move seamlessly on to our next debate.

[Sir Paul Beresford (Mole Valley) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered HPV vaccinations.

I am delighted to see you in the Chair, Dame Maria. I am also delighted to see the Minister. The subject of the debate is vaccination against the human papillomavirus. Unusually, both the Minister and I have seen HPV-related cancers, the destruction that the surgery to get rid of them does in providing a so-called cure, and how that often leaves patients. To be a little more positive, we have markedly moved our healthcare towards prevention. An increasingly vital arm of our preventive attack on various diseases must be vaccination. A vaccination strategy must focus not only on protection, but on elimination. For some diseases, we have been able to move towards elimination of the causative agent. That is the drive for me in this debate.

Vaccination has been around for a long time, ever since Dr Edward Jenner used the pus from a cowpox sore to inoculate an eight-year-old boy against smallpox in 1787—the first of thousands of people he and others inoculated and saved from smallpox that year. Millions upon millions have been inoculated since. I have no doubt that in this day and age, Dr Edward Jenner would have been up before the General Medical Council and struck off for recklessly endangering life, spreading disease and not following the guidance of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation—I do not cross swords with it very often, but I have done so in the distant past. Since 1787, the development of vaccines has saved multiple millions of lives and stopped even more millions from various serious illnesses. The brilliant development and use of covid vaccines was a spectacular example of how far and how quickly we can progress.

I remember the mass inoculation programme against the polio epidemic from when I was a very small child. We saw polio spread through our community. If I remember correctly, the vaccination was a series of three injections in the upper arm using a syringe with a needle that was, in my view as a child, like a hollow 4-inch nail sharpened at the working end. It was plunged into my arm, reused after sterilisation and sharpened on a leather strop. It really hurt. Of course, the polio vaccine is now just a sugar cube carrying the vaccine, and kids love it. It has effectively wiped out polio in this country and most others. As we are all aware, there have been huge advances in the development, delivery and programming of vaccines, particularly for small children, who have been given huge protection against a variety of diseases. Over decades, vaccinators have had the chance to rid the world of some of these nasty diseases. Polio has been virtually eradicated. Apart from a few pockets in the world, yellow fever—a horrendous disease—has gone. Smallpox has gone. Measles went, but it has come back, because the vaccinations slipped.

I turn to HP viruses. They are a large family of viruses, at least two of which are downright dangerous to humans because they are causative agents of very many human cancers. They cause cervical, uterine and penile cancers and—in my professional area, which the Minister is aware of from her point of view—head and neck cancers. I point out my professional interest as a very part-time dentist. Head and neck cancers can be very hard to detect early and are frequently very destructive to treat. Surgery is frequently required. Such surgery commonly impairs normal living, such as eating, smiling and talking, and often physical appearance.