Vaccination: Condition of Deployment

Steve Baker Excerpts

Monday 31st January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

If we look at the experience from the omicron wave, we can see that we had the fewest restrictions on people’s freedom of any large country in Europe, yet we have been the first country to come out of the omicron wave and hit the peak. I believe the main reason for that is that we rightly focused on pharmaceutical defences: vaccines in particular, of course, as well as antivirals and testing. There is a lot to be learned from that.

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

Though we may have arrived here by different routes, I am grateful that today my right hon. Friend and I agree on this policy area. We also agree that vaccination is the better choice for everybody for whom it is safe if they do not have a pre-existing condition. Can I just pick up the issue of language? He has used a range of tones when talking about people. He has used some quite soft language about persuasion, and we have heard a range of perspectives on that, but he has also used some very strident language, which my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Sir Charles Walker) criticised—rightly, I think. Can I ask my right hon. Friend to set out for the House what his attitude is to the issue of bodily autonomy and using the law to compromise it? If he does respect people’s bodily autonomy, can I ask him please to select language that is respectful of that choice?

[Sajid Javid]

I am pleased that my hon. Friend and I agree on what has been set out today, but he is right to raise what he has said in the way that he has. Language is vitally important, especially on issues of this great significance, when we are asking people to be injected with something, to put a needle to themselves and to get vaccinated, for all the right reasons. Of course some people will be more resistant than others to doing that, for whatever reason, and will have some kind of hesitancy. It is our duty to work with them. I am sure my hon. Friend will agree that when we reach for a statute in relation to vaccination, there needs to be a very, very high bar. He has heard me say at this Dispatch Box more than once that I would never support universal vaccination or any kind of statute. This policy I have talked about today required a very high bar to be reached. At the time we introduced the policy, I believed that the bar was reached, for the reasons I have set out about protecting vulnerable people. Now I believe it would be disproportionate, and that is why I have set this change out today. What has not changed is the importance of vaccination, and for those people who can get vaccinated and who are not medically exempt from it for some reason, we should continue to work together across this House to encourage them to do so and work with them in the most positive way possible, because they would be better off and we would all be better off.