Covid-19 Update

Neale Hanvey Excerpts

Thursday 22nd July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her excellent question and for the work that she does in her constituency to highlight the benefits of being vaccinated—and fully vaccinated. The work that has gone on in Hyndburn is tremendous. We are working with local government to ensure that the NHS has flexibility, whether that is to launch pop-up sites or to increase the hours of vaccination during this period of Eid celebration in order to encourage more of our Muslim fellow citizens to come forward and get vaccinated. Of course, we are ensuring that there is lots of messaging and that people are just pointed to information, including through hyper-local media as well as some of the media with which my hon. Friend’s generation will be more familiar than mine, such as TikTok, social media influencers and YouTubers. That is all happening at scale. It is great to see that the number of appointments booked under the national booking system has almost doubled in the last couple of days, but there are also the walk-in centres, where people can just walk in and get their jab without an appointment.

[Neale Hanvey (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (Alba)]

Mr Speaker, may I add my party’s thanks to you, to the House staff and to everyone across these islands who has worked so hard to save and preserve life during the pandemic?

I want to pick up on a vital component of vaccination that I believe the Government need to give great attention to. It will not have escaped the Minister’s attention, and anyone who has attended the regular briefings that we have had around the virus will have seen in Professor Van-Tam’s heat maps the distribution and upward spread of the virus, whereby it seeds in the younger population and exponentially grows up through the ages.

I really want to ask the Minister why he thinks the JCVI are being extremely cautious in extending vaccination to 12 to 17-year-olds, given that the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has now been vaccinating that population in the States—with some concerns, but, I think, manageable numbers of concerns—and why we are not progressing more vigorously to vaccinate that population and are limiting it to those with underlying health concerns or those related to people with underlying health concerns. There is a fundamental advantage to vaccinating this group, because it will increase their wellbeing and improve their access to schooling after their holidays, but, more importantly, it acts as—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. We have to be quicker if we can or nobody else is going to get in today; that is not fair to other Members. Questions in a statement have to be short. I hope that the hon. Gentleman is going to finish in a second.

[Neale Hanvey]

I will finish now, Mr Speaker; I apologise.

Does the Minister not see the advantage of delivering those vaccines now, and what do we do if we decide that that needs to go live during the recess?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

That is a very important question. The JCVI is constantly reviewing the data from other countries that are vaccinating all children of 12 to 15 years old. Its concern has been centred around vaccinating healthy children. There is a very rare signal of myocarditis on first dose. The JCVI is awaiting more data on second dose. It will continue to review that and will come back to us, and, of course, we will come back to the House.