UK Vaccination Strategy

Paul Beresford Excerpts

Monday 8th November 2021 Commons Chamber

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

After the earlier debate, I think I must make it absolutely clear that I occasionally practise dentistry, and that that is relevant to some of the points I am making today.

The previous Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, some considerable time ago, set out a change of direction for our health service that was based on prevention. Shortly after that, our health services—indeed, the world’s health services—were brutally assaulted by the arrival of covid from China.

I do not wish, in my few words this evening, to run a one-man inquiry into covid or into the way the UK or any other country handled it. I wish to push the Government to jump on the opportunity that I believe now exists because of the attitude of the majority of the population towards the preventive nature of vaccination.

Even detractors of the Government must give considerable credit for their willingness to invest in prospective vaccines and for the fact that there has been and still is a massive programme of preventive vaccination against covid and flu. I believe this is an opportunity for this country to continue to lead by building on the very best practice and collaboration fostered during the covid pandemic, to utilise vaccinations to save lives and to avoid damaging people. That would reduce the demand on our health services and would introduce a reduction in the financial demand on them.

We should be rapidly moving towards a broader and more robust, proactive approach to vaccination. That would protect us against future public health threats and against existing vaccine preventable diseases, especially respiratory diseases. I am looking to Health Ministers for clear leadership on vaccination to ensure that our health services continue to see it as a top priority. We must drive uptake across all ages, setting clear targets for adult vaccination, to bring it into line with our already great achievements on childhood vaccination. Such an approach could and should create an environment where the value of vaccines is recognised for our health and for our socioeconomic progress. It will keep our population out of our health services and keep them in their homes, in work and—dare I say—play, and keep our children safe and in education.

My first personal recognition of vaccination came with the polio epidemic that hit the world from to 1949 to 1952, sweeping through selective population centres and leaving as its most tragic sign children—sometimes permanently and sometimes temporarily—in wheelchairs, on crutches or in leg braces, and with deformed limbs. For children with polio in the late 1940s and early ‘50s, the disease caused paralysis in one in 1,000 cases among children aged five to nine. Polio also hit adults, and there were many deaths. Rescue came in the form of vaccination delivered in three doses of injections with stainless steel needles. My early childhood memory of the needles is that they looked like stainless steel 3-inch nails. They had to be thick enough to allow boiling water through them for sterilisation, and they were re-sharpened on leather strops. Subsequent improvements brought about a liquid dose and, ultimately, an impregnated sugar cube.

In Western countries, if not almost worldwide, polio, along with smallpox and yellow fever, has been pushed mostly into history. Ideally, most, if not all, vaccination programmes should be administered to a high percentage —probably more than 95%—of the population. We have a very effective routine immunisation schedule—at least, it is effective, or fairly effective, for children, with vaccinations at eight, 12 and 16 weeks and 12 months. To my dismay, it appears that there has been some slippage in the routine childhood vaccinations for the under-fives. These children should receive 10 vaccines in total, which provide protection against such hideous diseases as tetanus, polio and meningitis, along with many others. I am not sure of the latest figures, but I am sure the Minister can update us on them. The latest I could find were from 2018-19 and they showed that the uptake of the first dose of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine had fallen to 90.3%. I believe that was the fifth year in a row that it had dropped. Although I accept that 90.3% is a high figure and that the percentage changes may seem small, we must recognise that the impact must not be underestimated, particularly if this turns out to be a trend. The UK has lost its World Health Organisation measles-free status, and this comes three years after the virus was eliminated in the United Kingdom. Astonishingly, during 2018 there were nearly 1,0000 cases, which is more than double what the figure was in 2016.

There are a complex number of reasons for that, but one of the biggest factors, as we have seen in the covid battle, has been the appalling misinformation on vaccine dangers on social media. That has certainly affected the uptake of covid vaccines. I still find it incomprehensible that some individuals I know of quite high intelligence are absorbed into believing this appalling misinformation. Some parents think that these childhood infections are trivial. Such a view needs to be vigorously countered at every opportunity; anyone seeing a child deformed by polio or with badly affected eyesight from measles really needs to wake up.

There have been some great successes. Recently data indicated that the HPV vaccination given to girls has bought about a dramatic drop in cervical cancer. Now that it is available to boys, I hope that we will see a similar dramatic drop in years to come in oral and head and neck cancers. Those cancers hit males more than females—I could warn a few fathers on that. HPV types 16 and 18 cause cervical cancer, penal cancer and between 60% and 80% of oral, head and neck cancers. The treatments for head and neck cancers—particularly surgical treatments—which of course I have seen, are debilitating and often leave hideous damage to the patients.

There has been a call for all hospital and care home staff to be vaccinated against covid. This is no different from the requirement when I became a dentist in this country: dentists and surgeons were required to have the BCG—Bacillus Calmette–Guérin—injection and vaccination before they were able to work. If I had an elderly relative who was to go into a care home and the choice was between two homes, both being identical except one had all staff vaccinated and the other did not, the choice would be obvious.

Much has to be done to promote vaccinations through hospitals, GPs and pharmacies, and by any other means that the Minister might think up. The promotion of and reminder about vaccines has already been undertaken with covid; this approach could and should be applied to all vaccines. New contact methods through the likes of the NHS app and social media should be used. I believe there are financial encouragements for GPs and pharmacies to promote such vaccinations—please, step that up. That approach could be applied to more than just covid and flu.

It appears to me that there is no promotion of vaccination against shingles among the over-70s. Anyone who has seen a patient who is over 70, 80 or 90 with shingles will know what a ghastly, debilitating condition it is. Perhaps when the Minister replies she can give the House some glimpse of the Government’s thinking, even if at this stage it is speculative. In future, we must use vaccinations extensively, because that is the goal of the original set-up for prevention.