Covid-19 Vaccine Update

Neale Hanvey Excerpts

Thursday 4th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I am grateful to the Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee for his question, and he is absolutely right. The manufacturers are already working on variants to their vaccine to take into account the mutation of the virus. Viruses will mutate to survive and this virus is no different. There are about 4,000 mutations now around the world, some more concerning than others. We have, in the United Kingdom, a genome sequencing industry that is a world leader—about 50%, or just under, of the sequencing has taken place in the United Kingdom. Not only are we working with the current manufacturers—Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca and Moderna —that have been approved, but we are also looking at how we can make sure that we make the most of the new messenger RNA technology, which allows the rapid development of vaccine variants that will then deal with the virus variants as rapidly as possible. When I spoke to the Science and Technology Committee a few weeks ago, I said that we were planning to have in place the ability to go from the moment that we can sequence a variant that we are really concerned about to the moment that we can have a vaccine ready in between 30 to 40 days, with then, of course, the manufacturing time.

We have invested in Oxfordshire, in the Vaccines Manufacturing and Innovation Centre, and in the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult Manufacturing Innovation Centre in Braintree—£127 million there and just shy of £100 million in Oxfordshire—to be ready to manufacture any vaccine that we would need. The Prime Minister, of course, also visited those making what I refer to as our seventh vaccine, the Valneva vaccine. That is a whole inactivated virus, so it does not just work on the spikes in the way that the two current vaccines that we are deploying work. It works on the whole of the virus, which is much more likely to capture any mutations from the spikes and therefore be incredibly effective. We have invested in that production facility in Scotland so that we can have that vaccine as a future-proofing of annual vaccination strategies or a booster in the autumn, if necessary.

[Neale Hanvey (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (SNP) [V]]

I thank the Minister for advance sight of his statement. I am glad to hear his recognition of the importance of adherence to the clinical categories of the JCVI, and I also give my thanks to vaccination teams in my Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath constituency, across Scotland and, indeed, these islands.

I urge the Minister, however, to think more lightly of himself and deeply of the world. Over recent weeks, the UK Government and their allies in Scotland have quite disgracefully been attempting to sow fear in the minds of our vulnerable communities that vaccine deployment is too slow. That narrative was completely debunked yesterday, yet the Prime Minister still claimed that we have today passed the milestone of 10 million vaccines in the United Kingdom, including almost 90% of those aged 75 and over in England, and every eligible person in a care home. Today, however, on “Good Morning Scotland”, the Minister was further pressed on how many vaccines had been given—not offered, but given to people in care homes in England. Even with 24 hours’ warning and following a detailed probing, he was not able to offer more than a vague 91% of those eligible in an ill-defined subset, before settling on “a very high number”, and suggesting that care home staff’s vaccination may not yet have begun in England. Can he tell us today what percentage of all care home residents and all care home staff have had their jab in England and, if not, why not?

To return to the JCVI clinical prioritisation, in a recent written parliamentary question to the Minister regarding the clinically extremely vulnerable, he chose to regurgitate JCVI guidance rather than answering the question. With the encouraging news that the Oxford vaccine and potentially others have a measurable impact on transmission, can he update the House on what steps he has taken to ask the JCVI to review current guidance for household members of the clinically extremely vulnerable, such as people with blood cancer or organ transplantation, and thus provide a vital layer of protection to those who may not be able to receive the vaccine themselves?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I am grateful for the hon. Member’s question, albeit, dare I say, I do not recognise his description of our collaboration. We have, over the past two weeks, been working solidly. The British Army—the armed forces—have been working to deliver 80 vaccination sites in Scotland and to hand them over to NHS Scotland within 28 days, and that work began a couple of weeks ago. So I hope he recognises the effort the United Kingdom is putting in not just in supplying the vaccines for Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England, but in the way we are trying to support the vaccine deployment in Scotland.

Of course, last weekend was our target to make sure that every eligible care home in England was visited, and over 10,000 care homes have actually been visited and received the vaccine. Only a handful of care homes, which were deemed to have an outbreak, were not visited. The NHS, quite rightly, celebrated achieving that target last weekend, so I am slightly saddened, in a way, that there is this politicking between ourselves about this issue.

We continue—as the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Alex Norris), asked me—to work very hard to make sure that staff in care homes are also offered the vaccine on those visits, and they also have an opportunity to be vaccinated in their primary care networks and, of course, in hospitals.

On the JCVI, those who are clinically extremely vulnerable are in category 4, and we will vaccinate them by mid-February.