Covid-19

Steve Baker Excerpts

Monday 22nd February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con) [V]]

I begin by paying tribute to the NHS here in Buckinghamshire. Under quite extraordinary pressure, staff have continually risen to the challenge, and we should all be very proud of them.

We asked the Government for a road to recovery starting on 8 March, and I am pleased that they have now set it out, but the pace of change announced today will be a hammer blow for aviation, for pubs, restaurants, hotels, gyms and pools, and for the arts establishment. Once again, it seems to be modelling, not data, which is driving the Government’s decisions, even though, time and again, modelling used for serious covid decisions has been taken apart retrospectively. One of the four models used by the Government to illustrate the need for the second national lockdown predicted 1,000 deaths on 1 November, the day after it was presented to the public, when the actual number of deaths that day was just over 200. It has been reported that the road map is based on the new Imperial College modelling of the vaccine roll-out. Of course, as I know as a software engineer, what you put into a model determines what you get out of it. Well, the modellers have assumed that the uptake of vaccines for all groups will be 85%, when actually it has been 90%. They assume that there will be a drop in the uptake of the second dose of the vaccine to 75%, without any evidence. They assume that the vaccine’s efficacy in protecting against the risk of infection is 48% after one dose and 60% after two doses for both vaccines that we have available, but data from Public Health England shows that one dose reduces the risk of catching infection by more than 70%, rising to 85% after the second dose. These models really must be improved. I have said time and again that we need to drive up the standard of modelling. We need to introduce competitive expert advice with red team challenge, because experts are only human and we have been asking the impossible of them in the context of the challenges that they face.

I have said time and again that we need a new public health Act to learn from this crisis and make sure that the harms and the benefits of Government policy are properly assessed and that Parliament regularly has amendable motions before it. Thank goodness that in this document the Government have begun to acknowledge the socioeconomic cost of restrictions. The Government make it very clear that violent crime and drug addiction have gone up and that wellbeing has come down, with more anxiety and depression. They have been clear that the hardest hit have been the young, females, ethnic minorities and the lower-paid. That is why we need a new public health Act to ensure that our Parliament is properly informed so that never again do we impose these measures without knowing whether they will do more harm than good.