Covid-19 Update

Philippa Whitford Excerpts

Monday 6th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his support—he is right to talk about the importance of buying time—and for his comments about the NHS and the need to prepare. I reassure him that ever since we discovered omicron the NHS has been spending a substantial amount of time preparing.

My right hon. Friend mentioned the importance of discharges; they were important before but, where a patient is ready to be clinically discharged, they have become even more important now in the light of omicron. The recent funding that we provided for discharges—almost £500 million over this winter period—will help.

[Dr Philippa Whitford (Central Ayrshire) (SNP)]

As the Secretary of State has highlighted, we do not know about omicron’s severity, but its mutations certainly suggest a risk of increased transmissibility and possible immune escape. However, it is expected that vaccines will still provide protection—including, hopefully, against serious disease—so I echo the Secretary of State’s call for people to get vaccinated if they have not already done so.

With S-gene dropout providing an early PCR marker for omicron, can the Secretary of State clarify what proportion of labs in the UK assess the S-gene, and particularly what proportion of all the private labs providing travel testing, which are obviously critical in our defence against seeding cases into the UK?

I welcome the logical reintroduction of a pre-travel PCR, but does the Secretary of State recognise that the average incubation of covid is still five days, and does he not agree with the call from the Scottish and Welsh Governments to have a day 8 test for release?

Will the Government now hold a four-nation Cobra meeting to discuss the response and also commit to providing support for the travel sector and any other businesses that might be impacted by public restrictions going forward?

The Secretary of State described this as a global battle, and he is right, but the establishment of omicron in the UK is a stark reminder of the failure of wealthy nations to take a global response, as they promised last spring. While almost 90% of adults in the UK are doubly vaccinated, fewer than 4% in low-income countries have received at least one dose and less than a quarter of their healthcare staff are protected. The UK Government promised to deliver 100 million doses by next summer, but have so far delivered fewer than 10 million and, shamefully, destroyed 600,000 doses in August. It is estimated that the UK will be left with almost 100 million excess doses, so will this Government not accelerate their donations to COVAX?

Finally, 130 countries support the principle of waiving intellectual property rights and technological transfer to mount a global response to this pandemic, so why are the UK Government blocking the TRIPS waiver when most of these vaccines were developed with millions of pounds of public money?

[Sajid Javid]

First, let me thank the hon. Lady for her support for vaccination in general. Right across the UK, it is really making a difference, and I thank her for her comments on that, and especially on the importance of the booster programme.

On testing for this variant, she talked about the proxy measure, which is the S-gene dropout. There are other methods being deployed alongside that, which stop short of sequencing, but they take much longer, and the capability is not universal. Between these two proxy methods, the majority of testing centres can pick up the potential marker for omicron, but we are expanding that so that all testing centres will be able to do it very soon.

The hon. Lady talked about the restrictions. I point her to one of the important points that I made earlier, which is that the restrictions are temporary. As soon as they can be removed, we will remove them, and that is what industry and others want to see—as soon as we do not need them, we will remove them without any delay.

The UK can be proud of its commitment to vaccine donations to the developing world. We have a commitment of 100 million by June 2022. We have already delivered 22 million to COVAX and bilaterally. Another 9 million are on their way in the next couple of weeks, and we will meet our commitment.