Covid-19

Mohammad Yasin Excerpts

Tuesday 25th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. If the virus were designed to test liberal democracies, because the only way we could combat it was to withdraw people’s freedoms with the dreaded non-pharmaceutical interventions, the vaccine has played to the real strengths of the four nations that make up the peoples of these isles. We have had that Dunkirk spirit of coming together as 1,000 flotillas: the 80,000 volunteer vaccinators, the doctors, the nurses, the pharmacists and, of course, our armed forces and local government colleagues, who have stepped up not only to identify communities that we need to protect, but to find sites.

We are already making plans for the booster jab to be ready by September. I remind the House that the clinical decision has not yet been made, but when it is—whether that is in September, in October, in November or early in the new year—we will be ready to go. We are also planning how it will dovetail with our flu vaccination programme and seeing how we can increase the uptake in flu vaccination, because the worst of all worlds would be to do well against covid and then be hit by a heavy flu season in the autumn.

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab) [V]]

Last evening, I learned that the Government had sneaked Bedford borough into local lockdown without even bothering to warn the public health team. The Minister knows that for almost two weeks I have been calling for surge vaccines in Bedford for all over-16s, yet until last Friday many of my constituents were forced to travel miles to access the Pfizer vaccine. The variant first identified in India has been imported here because of the Government’s lax approach to border control. Why are the people of Bedford paying for the Government’s gross negligence and incompetence once again?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

The hon. Gentleman and I discussed the turbocharging of the vaccination programme in Bedford, which I know he appreciates. The real difficulty is that, if we now begin to vaccinate people who are 18, outside the JCVI’s advice, we are taking vaccine away from others who are eligible and need that protection. So the strategy we are pursuing is to turbocharge. I need to explain that a little. We are effectively putting in more resource, later opening and mobile vaccination centres and we are expanding vaccination centres, so that those who are already eligible and, for whatever reason, have been unable to access the vaccine or have been waiting to see, can get the protection of the first dose. Of course then we get the second dose into all those over the age of 50, because we know that the two doses in those areas, against the B.1.617.2 variant, make a huge difference.