Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Matt Hancock and Sheryll Murray

Tuesday 17th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Matt Hancock)]

Yesterday, the House will know that we secured 5 million doses of the Moderna vaccine, so we have now secured access to 355 million vaccine doses through agreements with seven separate vaccine developers. We have secured them for the whole UK.

[Mrs Murray [V]]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that answer. What assessment has he done of the logistics necessary to deliver a vaccine to more rural areas, such as Cornwall?

[Matt Hancock]

We have done a huge amount of work. The deployment of the vaccine is, of course, being led by the NHS, which reaches into all parts of the UK. Our principled approach is that we will deploy the vaccine according to clinical need in every single part of the UK at the same time. That, of course, includes rural areas. A significant amount of work has gone into how best to deploy to rural areas, especially as some of the people who clinically will need to get the vaccine first are also those who might find it most difficult to travel. It is a very important question on which a huge amount of work is being done.