Covid-19 Vaccine Update

Debate between Sarah Atherton and Nadhim Zahawi

Thursday 4th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I am grateful for the hon. Lady’s question. It is great to hear about the Harlequins joining the fight, as they always do, when it comes to the United Kingdom actually getting people protected and vaccinated.

Care home and domiciliary staff are both on our priority list, as the hon. Lady knows. We are working with local government, and David Pearson, who is of course a champion of the social care sector, has been working with local government to identify them. The best way to identify domiciliary staff is through local government, because a lot of people will be with agencies and, as the hon. Lady quite rightly pointed out, are hard to reach. They are in our target: they are part of the top four categories, with those who are caring for the elderly in residential care homes, and we will meet our target of offering them a vaccine by mid-February.

[Sarah Atherton (Wrexham) (Con) [V]]

British-based pharmaceutical companies have been pivotal in the global fight against this pandemic. Plants in Teesside, Livingston and Oxford, and Wockhardt in my constituency, are central to vaccine manufacture. So what conversations has my hon. Friend had with his Home Office counterparts to provide sufficient security to these vital pieces of national vaccine infrastructure?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I want to reassure my hon. Friend that, through the vaccines taskforce, we have been liaising extensively with the vaccines’ developers and the related organisations to ensure that the highest level of security exists through the whole vaccine deployment chain. That has, of course, included working directly with the manufacturers, and we have a senior responsible officer seconded to the team to make sure that security is at the forefront of everything we do to deliver this programme. We cannot allow a lapse of security to get in the way of the largest vaccination programme in the history of this country.