Covid-19 Update

Rupa Huq Excerpts

Wednesday 30th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

Yes, that is our goal. We changed the law to enable more people to inject vaccines and we have a big training programme on now. At the moment, it is the supply that is the rate-limiting step. We want to increase the rate of supply and the NHS’s capacity to deliver it at the same time.

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab) [V]]

By not needing extreme refrigeration, the new Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is a real breakthrough. Will the Health Secretary tell us how it will be administered to over-80s in care homes or at home who are too immobile to travel and who perhaps have carers, including dementia patients, under the hub-and-spoke model? Locally, ambulances are needed, ICU is full, Ealing Hospital is on a black alert and the way that doctors are being told to use oxygen sparingly is raising suspicions that it is running out. Hub-and-spoke is good on paper, but it may be time that the Secretary of State revisits it, because it keeps throwing up loads of anomalies.

[Matt Hancock]

The ability of the Oxford vaccine to be easily transported makes a huge difference, because it means we can take it to care homes—we can take the vaccine to the people—rather than the other way round for those who are immobile. Of course, for people who find it easy to travel, it is much more efficient to do it the other way round, so we will have a combination of community roll-out where we take the vaccine to the people and vaccination hubs where people come to get vaccinated. It is all based, as per my previous answer, on optimising the speed of delivery of the vaccine. That is what will both save lives and get us out of the restrictions as fast as possible.