Vaccine Roll-out

Richard Drax Excerpts

Thursday 21st January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Richard Drax (South Dorset) (Con) [V]]

First, can I praise and thank all the NHS staff in Dorset, who are doing a wonderful job fighting this pandemic? Secondly, we hear from some scientists that they want the country locked down until June, when 70% of the population will have been inoculated, and according to Sir Patrick Vallance, vaccines are not going to do all the “heavy lifting”, but what are we vaccinating for if we cannot begin to reopen our devastated economy and regain our freedoms? Does my right hon. Friend agree that this is about risk mitigation, not elimination, and that a path out of this lockdown is a decision for politicians, not scientists and modellers?

[Matt Hancock]

The decisions that we take are decisions, rightly, for politicians, guided by the best possible science. The challenge is how to get back the freedoms my hon. Friend rightly refers to as quickly and as safely as possible. The safety element of that is paramount, as is the speed. The one thing that will help on both is to roll out the vaccines as quickly as possible and to monitor their roll-out very closely so that we can see the effect of the vaccine on transmission. As we see more and more information about that, we will be able to make clearer judgments about the release and when we are able to lift some of these restrictions under which we are all having to live.