Oral Answers to Questions

Steve Baker Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

10. What his timescale is for awarding the £50 million funding for targeted motor neurone disease research through specific scientific programmes proposed by MND charities.

[The Minister for Care and Mental Health (Gillian Keegan)]

Researchers can apply right now to the National Institute for Health Research and UK Research and Innovation to access the £50 million of funding. The timescale for spending the money depends on the research applications received. The £50 million over five years is a minimum commitment, and we hope to spend much more than that on research in this vital area. We are working with the motor neurone community to help it effectively access the committed funding and to boost MND research even further.

[Mr Baker]

The Minister has made a positive announcement in the course of the last few months, and this is an important repetition, but there seems to be a slight miscommunication going on because organisations are telling me that they are not sure where the co-ordination is coming from. May I invite her to meet me and the coalition of patients and researchers to try to nail down exactly what is happening, in a spirit of good faith?

[Gillian Keegan]

I would be happy to meet my hon. Friend. I have also met some of the campaigners and researchers in this area, and the head of our research arm, so that we are clear. The support we are providing to the community includes a new £4 million MND partnership. That will bring the research community together so that they can pool resources and expertise to leverage that funding further, and ensure that they put forward strategic applications.

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.

Covid-19: Forecasting and Modelling

Steve Baker Excerpts

Tuesday 18th January 2022 Westminster Hall

[Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered forecasting and modelling during covid-19.

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I speak not to bury science, but to praise it. During the covid pandemic, there has been some remarkable, wonderful science; I just question to what extent that includes the modelling and forecasts that have come from it. Thanks to some questionable modelling that was poorly presented and often misrepresented, never before has so much harm been done to so many by so few based on so little questionable and potentially flawed data.

I believe that the use of modelling is pretty much getting to be a national scandal. That is not just the fault of the modellers; it is how their work was interpreted by public health officials and the media—and yes, by politicians, including the Government, sadly. Modelling and forecasts were the ammunition that drove lockdown and created a climate of manipulated fear. I believe that that creation of fear was pretty despicable and unforgivable. I do not doubt that modelling is important or that there has been some good modelling, but too often it has been drowned out by hysterical forecasts. I am not, as Professor Ferguson implied, one of those with an “axe to grind”. I do, however, care about truth and believe that if someone influences policy, as the modellers and Imperial College London have done, they should be questioned. Frankly, they have not been questioned enough.

Above all, I want to understand why Government, parts of the media and the public health establishment became addicted to these doomsday scenarios, and then normalised them in our country with such depressing and upsetting consequences for many. I do not pretend to be an expert; I am not. I defended my own PhD at the end of last year, but it is not in epidemiology and I do not pretend to be particularly knowledgeable about that. But depending on time—I know others want to come in as well—I will quote from 13 academic papers and 22 articles authored by a total of approximately 100 academics.

This is a story of three scandals, and the first one took place 21 years ago. In 2001, we faced the foot and mouth emergency. We reacted drastically by slaughtering and burning millions of animals, and farmer suicides and bankruptcies followed. That policy was allegedly heavily influenced by Imperial College modelling and Professor Ferguson. Since foot and mouth, two peer-reviewed studies examined the method behind that particular madness. I quote from them now to show there are practical and ethical questions over modelling going back two decades.

In a 2006 paper, and I apologise for these wordy, long titles, titled “Use and abuse of mathematical models: an illustration from the 2001 foot and mouth disease epidemic in the United Kingdom”—they are not that catchy—the authors confirmed that Ferguson’s model

“probably had the most influence on early policy decisions”

and

“specifically, the introduction of the pre-emptive contiguous culling policy”.

That is the mass slaughter of animals near infected farms. The authors said that the consequences were “severe” and

“the models were not fit for the purpose of predicting the course of the epidemic”

—not a good start. They remain “unvalidated”. Their use was “imprudent” and amounted to

“the abuse of predictive models”.

Devastatingly, the authors wrote

“The UK experience provides a salutary warning of how models can be abused in the interests of scientific opportunism.”

It is difficult to find a more damning criticism of one group of scientists by another.

A 2011 paper, “Destructive tension: mathematics versus experience—the progress and control of the 2001 foot and mouth disease epidemic in Great Britain”—bit of a mouthful—by four academics said the models that supported the culling policy were “severely flawed” and based on flawed data with “highly improbable biological assumptions”. The models were

“at best, crude estimations that could not differentiate risk”.

That is not a very good “at best”. At worst, they were “inaccurate representations”.

Sadly, the paper said, impatience for results

“provided the opportunity for self-styled ‘experts’, including some veterinarians, biologists and mathematicians, to publicise unproven novel options.”

Some of the scientific work—some of it modelling, some of it not, with some modelling by Ferguson and some not—was cited as “unvalidated” and “severely flawed”, with inaccurate data on “highly improbable assumptions” leading to “scientific opportunism”. Is anybody reminded of anything more recent that would suggest the same?

I scroll forward 20 years. As with foot and mouth, with covid we had a nervous Government presented with doomsday scenarios by Imperial—the 500,000 dead prediction—that panicked them into a course of profound action with shocking outcomes. After the lockdown had gone ahead, Imperial publicised on 8 June a study by, I think, seven of them arguing the justification for lockdown. It claimed that non-pharmaceutical interventions saved more than 3 million lives in Europe. Effectively, Imperial marked its own homework and gave itself a big slap on the back.

That work is now being challenged. Because of time, I will quote only a small selection. In a paper entitled, “The effect of interventions on COVID-19”, 13 Swedish academics—Ferguson ain’t popular in Sweden, I can tell Members that much—said that the conclusions of the Imperial study were not justified and went beyond the data. Regensburg and Leibniz university academics directly refuted Imperial College in a paper entitled “The illusory effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in Europe”, which said that the authors of the Imperial study

“allege that non-pharmaceutical interventions imposed by 11 European countries saved millions of lives. We show that their methods involve circular reasoning. The purported effects are pure artefacts, which contradict the data. Moreover, we demonstrate that the United Kingdom’s lockdown was both superfluous and ineffective.”

I am not saying that this stuff is right; I am just saying that there is a growing body of work that is, frankly, taking apart Imperial’s. Remember, we spent £370 billion on lockdown that we will never get back. I could continue with other quotes, but I think Members get the flavour.

Moreover, a substantial number of other papers now question not Imperial per se but the worth generally of lockdowns. A pre-print article by four authors, “Effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19: A Tale of Three Models”, said:

“Claimed benefits of lockdown appear grossly exaggerated.”

In another paper, three authors found no clear, significant benefit of lockdowns on case growth in any country. Other papers continue that theme. I will quote one more, on adults living with kids. Remember: we shut schools because we were scared that kids would come home and infect older people, who would then die. This paper, in The BMJ, found

“no evidence of an increased risk of severe COVID-19 outcomes.”

We shut down society and schools just in case, doing extraordinary harm to people’s lives, especially young people. I am not a lockdown sceptic, as Ferguson casually describes some of his critics, but I am becoming so. Do you know why, Sir Edward? Because I read the evidence, and there is a growing body of it. In fact, there is one quote that I did not read out. There was a study of lots of countries that had lockdowns and lots that did not, and the data was inconclusive.

The third element of the scandal is the recent modelling. Swedish epidemiologists looked at Imperial’s work and compared it with their own experience. Chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell said of Imperial’s work that

“the variables…were quite extreme…We were always quite doubtful”.

Former chief epidemiologist Johan Giesecke said Ferguson’s model was “almost hysterical”. In the House of Lords, Viscount Ridley talked of a huge discrepancy and flaws in the model and the modelling. John Ioannidis from Stanford University said that the “assumptions and estimates” seemed “substantially inflated”.

There was a second example last summer. In July 2021, the good Professor Ferguson predicted that hitting 100,000 cases was “almost inevitable”. He told the BBC that the real question was whether we got to double that or even higher. That is where the crystal ball starts to fail: we got nowhere near 200,000, and we got nowhere near 100,000. There was nothing inevitable about Professor Ferguson’s inevitability, and his crystal ball must have gone missing from the start. In The Times, he blamed the Euros for messing up his modelling because—shock horror—people went to pubs a lot to watch the games during the competition. When the tournament finished—shock horror—they did not. That seems to be the fundamental problem: where reality comes up against models, reality steamrollers them because models cannot cope with the complexity of real life. To pretend that they can and even that they are useful, when so many of them have proved not to be, is concerning.

Ferguson is only one of many people in Independent SAGE especially, but also SAGE, who did not cover themselves in glory. Raghib Ali—a friend of my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker), who I am delighted is present—is one of the heroes of covid. He noted that many left-wing SAGE members

“repeatedly made inaccurate forecasts overestimating infections”.

Very often, they were falsely described on the BBC.

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for mentioning my friend and constituent Raghib Ali, who has indeed been one of the absolute heroes of this pandemic—not only in his advice to us all, including online, but through his service in hospitals. I hope my hon. Friend will not mind my saying that I do not think any of us can speak for Raghib about his opinion of modelling, and I know my hon. Friend is not trying to.

[Bob Seely]

I quite agree, and I thank my hon. Friend for that, but I am deeply grateful to Raghib and other people for speaking out. Just for the record, the communist Susan Michie, who is quoted quite often by the BBC, is not a medical doctor, a virologist or an epidemiologist. She is a health psychologist, so why on earth is she talking about epidemiology?

The third scandal took place this winter. Imperial, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and others—I think they included Warwick—predicted 5,000 daily covid deaths, with 3,000 daily deaths as the best-case scenario. They were hopelessly inaccurate, and at this point the tide really begins to turn. Dr Clive Dix, a former vaccine taskforce head, said:

“It’s bad science, and I think they’re being irresponsible. They have a duty to reflect the true risks, but this just headline grabbing.”

As I say, the tide is turning. Oncology professor Angus Dalgleish describes Ferguson’s modelling as “lurid predictions” and “spectacularly wrong”. The great Carl Heneghan, another scientist who has emerged with great credit for his honesty and fairness of comment, says:

“it’s becoming clearer all that ministers see is the worst-case scenario”.

Professor Brendan Wren says:

“Dodgy data and flawed forecasts have become the hallmarks of much of the scientific establishment 2”—

what a damning quote!—

“which has traded almost exclusively in worst-case scenarios...this must stop now.”

I agree.

I will wind up in the next two to three minutes—I will speak for no longer than 15 minutes because other people wish to get in, and I am always mindful of that. What is the result of all this? The result, as UCL’s Professor Francois Balloux notes, is a

“loss of trust in government and public institutions for crying wolf.”

That is just it. We have had hysterical forecasts, models taken out of context, and worst-case scenarios normalised.

In the Army, there is something called the most dangerous course of action, and there is something called the most likely course of action. To sum up in one sentence how we got this wrong, we have effectively taken the most dangerous course of action and collectively—the politicians, media, scientists and health professionals—presented that as the most likely course of action, but it was not. Why did politicians say, “Follow the science” as a way of shutting down debate, when we know that science is complex and that our outputs are dependent on our inputs? It was down to public-health types, whose defensive decision making would only ever cost other people’s jobs, other people’s health, other people’s sanity, other people’s education and other people’s life chances.

We know that the Opposition supported lockdown from the word go, but a little more opposing might have been helpful. The BBC and the Guardian have been salivating at state control and doomsday scenarios. Against this tsunami of hysteria and fear, thank God for The Spectator, The Telegraph and, yes, the Daily Mail for keeping alive freedom of speech and putting forward an alternative, which is now being increasingly scientifically vindicated. I accept that lockdown was understandable at first—I get that—but I believe the continuation of lockdown after that first summer was an increasingly flawed decision.

In wrapping up, I have some questions. To Professor Ferguson and the doomsday modellers: why are so many of your fellow academics disputing your work and your findings? To the BBC, as our state broadcaster: why did you so rarely challenge Ferguson, SAGE or Independent SAGE? Why did we misrepresent experts, and why did the BBC allow itself to become the propaganda arm of the lockdown state? To the Government: how could we have been so blinkered that we thought that following the science meant shutting down scientific debate? Why did we never use other datasets in contexts with the British people, or even in contexts in which these profound and enormous decisions were made? Why did we think that it was in our nation’s interests to create a grotesque sense of fear to manipulate behaviour? SAGE and Independent SAGE kept on getting it wrong. To the public health types, I quote from Professor Angus Dalgleish again:

“Flailing around, wallowing in hysteria, adopting impractical policies and subverting democracy, the Chief Medical Officer is out of his depth. He has to go if we are ever to escape this nightmare.”

He is not a journalist; he is an oncologist—a senior oncologist.

Twice in 20 years, we have made some pretty profound and significant errors of judgment, using modelling as a sort of glorified guesswork. I suggest respectfully to the Government that, after foot and mouth and covid, never again should they rely on dubious modelling, regardless of the source and regardless of the best intent. I am sure that Imperial and all these other people do the best that they can, and am very happy to state that publicly. However, why has so much of their work been described—and I will use the words of other academics—as “unvalidated”, “flawed”, “not fit for purpose”, “improbable”, “almost hysterical”, “overconfident”, “lurid”, “inflated”, “pessimistic”, “spectacularly wrong”, “fraudulent” and as “scientific opportunism”?

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[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

Thank you very much, Sir Edward. I begin by referring to the declarations that I have made in connection to the Covid Recovery Group.

I am a professional aerospace and software engineer—at least I was in my former life. I have an MSc in computer science, and am very interested in models. However, there is an old joke among engineers, which derives from a “Dilbert” cartoon, that the career goal of every engineer is not to be blamed for a major catastrophe. I wonder whether that spirit infuses not only expert advice but modelling in particular. We are all indebted to The Spectator for its data hub, which shows how data has worked out against models. As anyone can see by going to data.spectator.co.uk, it is the same story again and again: enormous great molehills of death projections, and underneath them the reality of much lower lines. I will leave it to people to look for themselves at the data, rather than trying to characterise the curves for Hansard.

There is a great deal to be done in terms of institutional reform of the way in which modelling is done and informs public policy. That is a very old problem; I found a great article in Foreign Affairs that goes back a long time, to the post-war era, about this problem. It is time we did something about it, through institutional reform. The situation is now perfectly plain: under the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984, even our most basic liberties can be taken away with a stroke of a pen if a Minister has been shown sufficiently persuasive modelling—not even data—that tells them that there is trouble ahead.

I have put this on the record before, and I hope that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister will not mind. Before we went into the 2020 lockdown, he called me; I was amazed to be at home and to have the Prime Minister of the UK call me. “Steve, I have been shown death projections—4,500 people a day and the hospitals overwhelmed.” I gave him two pieces of advice: “First, if you really believe that we are going to have 4,500 people a day die, you’d better do whatever it takes to prevent that from happening,” which is not advice that anyone would have expected me to give, but that is what I said, and, “Secondly, for goodness’ sake, go and challenge the advice—the data.”

That is why Carl Heneghan, Raghib Ali, Tim Spector and I, whether in person or virtually, were seen in Downing Street, and were there to challenge the data. By Monday, Carl Heneghan had taken the wheels off those death projections, by which the Prime Minister had, disgracefully, been bounced, using a leak, into the lockdown. That is absolutely no way to conduct public policy. However, the reason someone—we will not speculate who—bounced the Prime Minister is that they had been shown those terrifying death projections, which could not possibly be tolerated. Those projections were wrong.

It is monstrous that millions of people have been locked down—effectively under house arrest—have had their businesses destroyed and have had their children prevented from getting an education. Any of us who visit nursery schools meet children, two-year-olds, who have barely socialised. We cannot even begin to understand the effects on the rest of their lives. It is not the modellers’ fault, and I do not wish to condemn modellers. They are technical people, doing a job they are asked to do. We have to ask them to do a different and better job—one which does not leave them, like the old joke about engineers, afraid of being responsible for a major catastrophe.

As my friend Professor Roger Koppl said in his book “Expert Failure”, experts have all the incentives to be pessimistic because if they are pessimistic and events turn out better, they are not blamed. I am sorry: I am not blaming them personally, but I am blaming the whole system for allowing this to arise. The extraordinarily pessimistic models plus the bouncing of a Prime Minister did so much harm.

We need to conduct institutional reform. In relation to models, Mike Hearn, a very senior software engineer, has published a paper available on my website. It is a summary of methodological issues in epidemiology. There are about seven points—an extraordinary set of arguments: things such as poor characterisation, statistical uncertainty and so on, which I have no time to get into. The fundamental point is that we must now have an office of research integrity. The job of that office would be to demand—to insist—that the assumptions going into models and the nature of the models themselves were of a far higher quality.

Finally, to go back to an area of my own expertise, I encourage any software engineer to look at the model code that was released.

[Bob Seely]

Where does my hon. Friend believe that body should sit: within BEIS or a separate scientific institution?

[Mr Baker]

I think it should be in the Cabinet Office, because we see that scientific advice applies right across Government.

The code quality of the model that was released was really not fit for a hobbyist. The irony is that the universities that do modelling will overwhelmingly have computer science departments. For goodness’ sake, I say to modellers, go and talk to software engineers and produce good quality code. For goodness’ sake, stop using C++. People are using, as they so often do, the fastest computer programming language, but also the most sophisticated and dangerous. As a professional software engineer, the first thing I would say is, “Don’t use C++ if you don’t have to. Models don’t need to; they can run a bit slower. Use something where you can’t make the desperately poor quality coding errors that were in that released model code”. That is really inexcusable and fulfils all the prejudices of software engineers against scientists hacking out poor quality code not fit for hobbyists. As I think people can tell, I feel quite strongly about that, precisely because these poor modellers have had unacceptable burdens placed on them. All the incentives for them to be pessimistic can now be seen in the data. This all has to be changed with an office of research integrity.

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[Miriam Cates (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) on securing this very important debate and making an excellent speech. I have no wish to repeat the brilliant research that he recited, but he did highlight the repeated failures of modelling throughout the pandemic, not just the modelling but how it is being used. The models have not been out by just a few per cent, as he said, but often by orders of magnitude. The way that the models have been used has had life-changing impacts on people across the country.

Before I was a politician, I was a science teacher. One of the joys of teaching science to teenagers is conducting practical experiments in the lab. Once the teacher has ensured that they are not going to burn down the lab, it is important to teach them how to conduct an experiment properly and write it up. The first thing is to create a hypothesis. They must write a statement of what they think will happen and why, using the scientific knowledge they have and some assumptions, then carry out the experiment, write up the research and, crucially, evaluate. They must look at the hypothesis and at what they have observed, and decide whether they match. If they do match, they go back to their assumptions and see why they were correct. If they do not match, if what has happened in the lab and been recorded does not match the hypothesis, they need to ask why—“What assumptions did I make that did not bear out in real life, that did not happen in the lab?”

It seems to me that those are the questions that have not been asked throughout this crisis. Perhaps we can understand why assumptions had to be made quickly the first time, for the first lockdown—assumptions that turned out not to be true. My hon. Friend said that perhaps we are repeating history of 20 years ago, and that there is not that excuse. However, during subsequent waves and restrictions, why were those assumptions not questioned? There were assumptions about how likely the different scenarios were, about people’s behaviour and fatality rates.

Even in December, when plan B was voted through, some of the assumptions could have been declared wrong in real time—the assumption that omicron was as severe as delta, and that the disease would escape the vaccine. Some of the figures were almost plucked out of the air and given no likelihood. Those assumptions should have been challenged earlier and we need to ask why.

I picked up on one assumption following an interview with Dr Pieter Streicher, a South African doctor. He suggested that SAGE models have always assumed that infection rates do not reach a peak until about 70% of the population have had the disease, whereas the real-world data suggest that the infection rates start to slow at around 30% of the population. That makes more sense from a social science point of view, because we know that people are not equally sociable.

Studies by sociologists such as Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote the best-selling “The Tipping Point”, describe the law of the few, where very few people are extremely sociable and pass on a virus, idea or whatever, to many people. Many more people do not socialise as much and are not as good at transmitting. Perhaps we should have looked a lot more at social science, at behaviour and people’s interactions, rather than pure virology and what might happen in a lab. Of course, we do not exist in labs and cannot model the interactions of human beings that easily.

The tragedy is that this was not a paper exercise. This is not an experiment that happened in a lab where one can go back and repeat until valid results are achieved. These models, and particularly the weight they have been given, have caused serious destruction of lives and livelihoods. Who was modelling the outcomes for education, child abuse and poverty? Who was modelling the impact on loneliness, despair and fear? We have to ask why those assumptions were not interrogated.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker) has made some excellent points about the need for institutional reform. I completely agree with him, but we also need to look at the impact on free speech. At the beginning of this crisis, the mainstream media took on the idea that lockdown was the only strategy.

[Mr Baker]

My hon. Friend spoke earlier about the repeatability of scientific experiments with hypotheses. One of the reasons I talked about C++ is that by using multithreading, it is possible to end up with code that does not produce repeatable outputs. Does she agree that it is very important that when models are run, they produce consistent and coherent outputs that can be repeated?

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[Brendan O'Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)]

Thank you for calling me, Sir Edward. My first thought is, thank goodness that health is devolved. It will surprise no one to learn that I will not be joining the libertarian pile-on against scientists led by people who, even in these circumstances in a Chamber this small, still do not use face coverings.

[Mr Baker]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Brendan O'Hara]

No, I will not. The libertarian right have had enough of a kick at the ball in this debate. [Interruption.] No, I will not give way. At least half of those who have spoken today are not wearing face coverings.

I know that it is customary at this point to thank the Member who secured the debate but, in a break from tradition, I will start by thanking the scientists––the analysts, the medical professionals, the health experts, the clinicians and everyone else who stopped what they were doing two years ago and dedicated their lives to trying to work out and predict where the global pandemic might go and the impact that it could have on us. Two years ago, when tasked with working out this brand-new virus, every step that they took was a step into the unknown. There was no textbook to chart the route of this pandemic and every decision that they took was a new decision. They knew that every piece of advice they gave could have serious consequences for the population. The pressure of doing real-time covid-19 analysis must have been enormous. I, for one, really appreciate that scientists erred on the side of caution in the midst of a global pandemic in which tens of thousands of people were dying when there were no vaccines or booster protection. To all the SAGE officials, scientists, medical staff and public health experts who have done a remarkable job in keeping us safe, I say a huge and unequivocal thank you.

We know and can accept that forecasting and modelling during a pandemic are not an exact science but based on the best available evidence and a series of scenarios, presented from the best to the worst case. As Professor Adam Kucharski of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said,

“a model is a structured way of thinking about the dynamics of an epidemic. It allows us to take the knowledge we have, make some plausible assumptions based on that knowledge, then look at the logical implications of those assumptions.”

As the much-maligned Professor Ferguson told the Science and Technology Committee,

“Models can only be as reliable as the data that is feeding into them.”

Of course such models have their limitations. They are not forecasting modelling but mathematical projections based on the data available to modellers. If the tests are not being done, or tests are not being registered as positive, for example, the data modelling and forecasting can be affected. It is important to remember, however, that while the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) was telling anyone who would listen that modelling predictions were a national scandal, Professor Chris Whitty was telling the Science and Technology Committee that

“a lot of the advice that I have given is not based on significant forward modelling. It is based on what has happened and what is observable.”

Advice on lockdown and other public health measures was given by SAGE and others on the basis of observable data, not on forecasting modelling alone. I put it to the hon. Member for Isle of Wight that he was quite wrong when he told GB News that

“So much of what’s happened since with…inhuman conditions that many of us struggled with”

was

“built on some really questionable science.”

Professor Whitty said clearly that he did not base his advice on that; rather, he based it on what he could see around him.

The primary purpose of modelling is simply to offer a sense of the impact of different restrictions. A report by researchers for the journal Nature found that the first lockdown saved up to 3 million lives in Europe, including 470,000 in the UK. The success of disease modelling was in predicting how many deaths there would have been if lockdown had not happened. SAGE officials, scientists and medical staff have done a remarkable job to keep us all safe, and many people across these islands owe their lives to them. I believe that the work that those people have done under enormous pressure should be applauded and appreciated, not undermined by the far-right libertarian Tories we have today.

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[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)]

Thank you, Sir Edward; it is a pleasure to serve under your chairship. I congratulate—I think—the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) on securing the debate, because I welcome impartial and honest interrogation of the science, as well as decisions made over the last two years that have been important for our country. I also welcome extreme scepticism about some of the decisions made by the Government. This debate has not been an honest and independent inquiry into the science, however. It clearly comes with an ideological bent, so it has to be taken in that light.

I also begin by paying tribute to our public servants and Government scientists.

[Mr Baker]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Fleur Anderson]

I think I will make some progress first.

[Mr Baker]

I am not being rude; I just want to ask a question about what the hon. Lady has said.

[Fleur Anderson]

The hon. Gentleman has not even heard what I have to say yet.

[Mr Baker]

The hon. Lady said that we have made points that require an ideological bent. I invite her to look at what I said and identify at least three points that required any kind of ideological justification. Contrary to the point made by the hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O'Hara), nothing that I said required libertarian political philosophy.

[Fleur Anderson]

That was another speech. I have never been in a room with so many software engineers who are also MPs. I begin by paying tribute to our public servants, our Government scientists, epidemiologists, and the scientific community who have worked tirelessly and put everything on the line to keep the public safe. That is what they have been trying to do over the past two years: keep people safe and save lives—and they have. They have shouldered the fear, anguish and hope of an entire nation that was experiencing deep trauma. They have, magnificently, been prepared to put their head on the block, if needs be. I hope the Minister will agree with me that it is very disappointing to hear them come under attack today from certain colleagues, despite everything that they have done.

I would remind those who seek to attack SAGE and our Government scientists that, while they were looking forward, planning and working hard on the evidence of what the virus might throw at us next, it was freshers week in Downing Street. They are not the enemy here. In fact, had a bit more attention been paid to their models, had there been more modelling before the start of the pandemic and had more action been taken in February and March 2020, thousands of lives could have been saved. It is not modelling that is the intrinsic problem here—it is decision making.

Modelling is a hugely important tool for managing epidemics that is tried and tested, with constant efforts to improve it. I agree with earlier comments that there should be more models; there should be models about the impact on mental health, education, poverty and models to learn from other countries in order to inform our decisions. As Graham Medley, one member of SAGE, explains very clearly, models are not predictions and are not meant to be seen as such; they are the “what ifs” that can be used by Governments to inform decisions and guide them as to what they might need to prepare for, which should include the worst-case scenarios—that is a crucial distinction. Accurate predictions cannot be made with such an unpredictable virus, when individual behaviour is also unpredictable, so models and scenarios are the best tools to give us the parameters for the decisions that will be made. As Graham Medley said, SPI-M—the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling—the sub-committee of SAGE that he chairs, produced

“scenarios to inform government decisions, not to inform public understanding directly. They are not meant to be predictions of what will actually happen and a range of scenarios are presented to policymakers with numerous caveats and uncertainties emphasised.”

Who would want it any other way?

My question to the sceptical Members present here today is: what is the alternative? We need to have those parameters. The alternative is guessing without parameters and knowledge.

[Mr Baker]

I am very happy to answer that question.

[Fleur Anderson]

I am going to move on. I do not want another speech from the hon. Member, given the time constraints. I am waiting for the Minister to answer my questions.

The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee also had problems with the communication of the modelling. It is there that I might have some common ground with the hon. Members who have spoken earlier. The Committee said in its report last March that communication has not always been transparent enough, and accountabilities have been unclear. I agree with this. If the time is not taken carefully to explain what modelling actually is to the public and media, and instead room is allowed for scenarios to be interpreted as predictions, inevitably the practice of modelling and forecasting will be rubbished and scoffed at and Government scientists blamed as doom-mongers. Not communicating the data and models properly creates more uncertainty and misery for small businesses, who have been asked enough as it is, as we saw over the Christmas period.

--- Later in debate ---

[Maggie Throup]

I am conscious that I need to leave time at the end, but I will endeavour to get through my speech and take interventions.

It is not, however, and never can be, a crystal ball, regardless of who is doing the modelling. Models cannot perfectly predict the future, and modellers would not claim they do so. Contrary to how they may be presented in the media, modelling outputs are not forecasts, nor do they focus only on the most pessimistic outcomes. Model advice to Government is not simply a single line on a graph.

There is always uncertainty when looking into the future: uncertainty from potential policy changes, the emergence of new variants, or people’s behaviour and mixing and the changes that that brings. Central to modelling advice is an assessment of this uncertainty, what factors drive the uncertainty and how the results might change if the model’s inputs and assumptions change as new evidence emerges. As such, the modellers look at a wide range of possibilities and assumptions in order to advise policy makers on principles, not to attempt to say exactly what will happen..

[Mr Baker]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. She heard what I said about my conversation with the Prime Minister—it is, of course, a true account of what happened. The reality is that the Prime Minister was shown a terrifying model that subsequently proved to be wildly incorrect, but he took away freedoms from tens of millions of people on that basis. The Minister must surely agree that that does not accord with the very sensible words that she is saying. That is not what actually happened. The Prime Minister was bounced on the basis of profoundly wrong models.

Covid-19 Update

Steve Baker Excerpts

Thursday 13th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

The hon. Lady raises an important issue: ensuring we do all we can as a Government to work with schools to protect schoolchildren so they can stay in school. No one wants to see what happened before with the lockdowns and children not being able to attend school in the usual way. That is why I hope she welcomes the recent announcement by my right hon. Friend the Education Secretary on a huge new investment in ventilation. My right hon. Friend takes this issue incredibly seriously, working with schools up and down the country, and seeing what more can be done.

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

Implicit in my right hon. Friend’s statement was the concept that we will all be held back by the decisions of the unvaccinated. If I may say so, he used some quite heavy language to bring pressure to bear on the unvaccinated, talking about standing on people’s shoulders and so on. Would it not be better, rather than creating what seem to me to be the conditions for coercion and division, to say to the unvaccinated, “You’ve made your choice to take a greater risk and we are not going to be held back as a society by your choices. You will have to bear the consequences”? Would that not be a more consistent and humane way to deal with them, and to deal with us all, without creating division?

[Sajid Javid]

First, may I take this opportunity to thank my hon. Friend for the scrutiny he provides? As always, he makes important points that are worth discussing. He is right about the language I used earlier, because it is factually correct to say that. The reason this country is as free as it is now is the decision that nine out of 10 people have made to get vaccinated. Those people who decided not to be vaccinated when they could have been, because they are not medically exempt, for example, made a choice and that has consequences. It does not just have consequences for them; it has consequences for all of us.

My hon. Friend might be interested to know that when I visited the ICU ward looking after covid patients in King’s College Hospital in London last week, I was told by the consultant in charge that they estimate that 70% of patients in the ICU ward are unvaccinated. If those people had got vaccinated, they would not only have been safer, but space in hospitals, and not just in ICU wards, could have been used for others. There are 17,000 covid-positive patients in our hospitals. That could have been prevented if those who were unvaccinated or who decided not to take their booster shot had actually bothered to have their vaccination. Yes, getting vaccinated needs to be a positive choice: we need to encourage people and, with the exception of the health and social care high-risk settings, it should not be done by compulsion. I do not believe in that. I do not think it would work and I think it is unethical, but the people who have chosen not to get vaccinated should understand the consequences of their decision for the rest of society.

Vaccination Strategy

Steve Baker Excerpts

Wednesday 12th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

When what is at stake is the balance of health risk for children right across Wycombe and every constituency in the whole country, is my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Miriam Cates) not absolutely right to ask my hon. Friend the Minister to task the JCVI and the medical officers with a reassessment of new evidence? My hon. Friend just said at the Dispatch Box that evidence is kept under continuous review—and she nods—so why can she not please say at the Dispatch Box that she will ask the experts to revisit the new evidence, just to check that the balance of health risk for children is still appropriate and that she is satisfied with the responsibility, which she bears, for the decision that has been taken?

[Maggie Throup]

My hon. Friend is quite right that we do bear responsibility. I do not take these decisions lightly at all and neither does my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State. That is why the JCVI and the CMO continually review not just the UK data but the national data for every age range, every vaccine and every eventuality. The CMO will have heard my hon. Friend’s request and I am sure he will be completely focused on making sure that the JCVI continues to monitor the situation in the specific way my hon. Friend asks for.

Public Health

Steve Baker Excerpts

Tuesday 14th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

I will give way one more time for now and then I will come back to other colleagues.

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

I am grateful, and I think my views on this are pretty well understood. Given the case the Secretary of State is setting out, one thing I am puzzled by is why he is only going as far as he is. Will he explain to us why, in his estimation, the measures he is taking are equal to the situation that he is describing?

[Sajid Javid]

That is a very fair question, as always from my hon. Friend. In the measures we are setting out, we are taking into account the very best advice we are being given—this includes making sure that we are not just listening to every piece of advice or every forecast we are seeing. He will recall that back in the summer had we listened to some of the advice we were receiving we would not have opened up in the way we did. So we are taking account of the advice, deciding whether it should influence our decision making and then coming to a balanced and proportionate response: the measures I have talked of and, for example, increasing the booster programme, which I will turn to in a moment too.

--- Later in debate ---

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

As you know, Madam Deputy Speaker, I was trying to help you with the intervention by withdrawing from the list, but I am grateful to be on top of the list for the Labour Benches.

I agree with my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) the Leader of the Opposition when he says that the Prime Minister is a threat to public health. I think that that is absolutely right. I draw a different conclusion from my hon. Friends on the Labour Front Bench on how we should respond: not by being irresponsible but by taking a look at the way the Government have dealt with the whole of the covid crisis from the very beginning to what they continue to do.

I am a member of the Science and Technology Committee. Together with the Health and Social Care Committee we produced a 150-page report. I hope that right hon. and hon. Members have had the time to read it. They may not agree with its conclusions, but it contains very valuable information. The key point, which a lot of the press missed, was not that the Government followed the science on the issue but that they got into a groupthink with the scientific advisers and did not challenge them. They assumed that science was something handed down on tablets of stone, whereas it is not. It is a process and it needs challenging by those of us who have responsibility in this House for making laws and policies, and by other scientists. We seem to be repeating that process.

My Committee had as a witness this morning Susan Hopkins. Let me say that at best—if I can use a word somebody else used—the advice we were getting from her as an adviser was opaque. The information we were getting was opaque when it should be transparent. This time last week, the Deputy Prime Minister stood up and said there was no plan to go to plan B. Some 36 hours later, we were starting plan B. Why was that? What was the scientific advice given?

We were told fairly definitively that no such advice was given to change the view. What changed the view was that the Prime Minister was in a state of crisis and under pressure from his own Back Benchers and everybody else. That is not a sensible way to make decisions. It is not a sensible way to make decisions to put forward statutory instruments that say—the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, the hon. Member for Erewash (Maggie Throup) was waving a sheet about, which may or may not have been the impact assessment—that no impact assessment has been done.

[Mr Steve Baker]

I have in my hand the impact assessment for vaccination as a condition of deployment in health and care providers—I was not able to get in earlier. I feel confident that the Front Benchers will know that the estimate is that 88,000 people will leave the health sector, 73,000 will leave the NHS, 15,000 will leave the independent health sector, and 35,000 workers will leave domiciliary care. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that that is reason enough to vote against imposing this on the nation?

[Graham Stringer]

That is very interesting. It is also interesting that papers circulated by the Vote Office said there was no impact assessment. That does not impress me.

The point I was just about to make—I do not know if other hon. and right hon. Members have noticed this—is that the 355-page Act passed at the start of the epidemic, the Coronavirus Act 2020, is barely being used. The Government could have used the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 to bring in some of the restrictions that they have placed—maybe necessarily, maybe unnecessarily—on people’s freedoms. The difference between the 2004 Act and the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984 is quite simply that much less scrutiny is available under the latter. Once regulations are passed, if there is not a sunset clause, they last. The Government should not be rewarded for unnecessarily using tough authoritarian legislation when other legislation was available that would have allowed more scrutiny.

The Government have refused to give information. My hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) began his speech by saying that different people have different views and weigh the factors of civil liberties and health in different ways. That is absolutely right, but the Government will not tell us the costs and benefits of their policies. We now know that three quarters of a million people have failed to be tested for cancer. This is not a win-win situation. Cancer patients who are yet to be tested will eventually die because of the decisions being taken, because services are not available; some people will die of covid.

To come to the right decisions, this House needs all the information available, but it is not coming from the NHS and it is not coming from Government Ministers. That is why I will not give the Prime Minister the benefit of my support for the way he has arranged to respond to this covid crisis.

Public Health

Steve Baker Excerpts

Tuesday 30th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Maggie Throup]

I reassure the hon. Lady that we listen to the advice of health professionals all the time, but today we are debating statutory instruments on face coverings and self-isolation following travel.

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

Is the Minister seriously saying that it is not for Ministers to have any particular view on officials employed in the Department going out and taking a position that is at odds with the Government’s public policy? If it is now the policy that even Department employees can take their own personal positions, we are facing chaos and the overturning of long-standing Government principles.

[Maggie Throup]

I reiterate that I cannot speak for other people. I am setting out the measures today that we implemented this morning in a timely fashion, and it is those measures that we are considering. From the Government’s point of view, that is the legislation that we are implementing.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

I refer to the declarations that I have made relating to the Covid Recovery Group.

I am especially pleased to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper), with whom I agree. I will try to elaborate on some of the arguments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale West (Sir Graham Brady) and my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Steve Brine), who made a particularly brilliant speech.

My starting point is that today’s debate is not really about the incremental inconvenience of the mandating of face masks. I repeatedly chose to wear one on the train recently when it was not mandatory to do so, but that is not the point today. As my hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale West implied, the issue is that we are taking away the public’s right to choose what they do, based on flimsy and uncertain evidence. We do not know the extent to which this new variant will escape the vaccines and we do not know how harmful it would be. This debate goes to the heart of the nature of the society that we are creating.

The hon. Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper) talked about the harm principle. I entirely endorse the idea that our liberty should be constrained by the harm that we do, but in an intervention my hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale West made the point about flu: now that we have got the case fatality rate down to a comparable level with that of flu, we should be living with coronavirus like we live with flu. As my hon. Friend asked, are we going to manage other diseases like this?

Let me turn to the point that I really want to flesh out. The Government’s approach seems to be to say, “Better safe than sorry. You can’t be too careful.”. The trouble is that we really can be too careful. There is a problem that I call tunnel vision and my friend, Professor Paul Dolan from the London School of Economics, calls situational blindness, whereby we end up looking only at the disease. My hon. Friend the Member for Winchester has set out brilliantly the harm that will be done to children. I cannot begin to understand the psychological harm to children of being in masks all the time; we cannot go back and repeat the experience of a missed nativity play, and so on.

The economic cost of the coming pingdemic will be huge. Only today, the problems that Virgin Atlantic will have were on the front page—and fleshed out in the business section—of The Daily Telegraph. If the Government keep going down this path in these circumstances, when, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean said, the disease is going to be endemic and we must learn to live with it, and if we panic every time that there is a new variant—and there will be new variant after new variant—we will make entire sections of our society uninvestable, such as airlines, hospitality and tourism—many of the things that give us joy, hope and something to look forward to.

Where is the hope from the Government? I know young people who are demoralised and depressed, and who have been telling me that we will go back into lockdown, and I have been saying, “No, because the vaccines are working and I do not believe that Conservative Ministers will do this to us”, but we have already started to see the scope creep, the mission creep, and the goalposts perhaps being slightly unshackled from the ground, ready to be moved.

Today’s debate is not about face coverings or the coming pingdemic through self-isolation measures. It is about how we react and the kind of nation and civilisation that we are creating in the context of this new disease. What is the relationship between the state and the individual? Are we to be empty vessels or mere automata—things to be managed, as if a problem? Or are we free spirits with, for want of a better term, a soul? We are free spirits with a soul—people who deserve the dignity of choice and the meaning in our lives that comes from taking responsibility. It is possible that meaning in our lives comes from little else. This is a fundamental choice between heading towards heaven and heading towards hell. If we continue to react to these fears and uncertainties by taking the authoritarian course, without impact assessments—because the regulations are only temporary, you know—we are embarked on that downward course.

Even loneliness shortens lives. Again, Paul Dolan has been very clear with me that loneliness cuts lives short, and yet we find an official going beyond Government policy to say that we should not have unnecessary socialising. The most extraordinary set of choices are being taken because of an overwhelming, narrow focus on the one issue of coronavirus. It falls on Ministers to provide the lead, the breadth of thinking, the vision and the values to set out what broad kind of society we are trying to create. Where are we going as a society and civilisation? What will be our redemption and salvation? How will we provide that hope for our future? I believe that it will be by having faith in one another. The public are not fools. We are not here to govern idiots. I have faith in the British public that they can choose for themselves to do the right thing: to wear a mask when it is sensible, to pay attention to the level of cases, to choose for themselves whether they go to a restaurant, and, indeed, to choose whether they visit vulnerable relations in care homes—I could tell a sad story about that point.

Before I finish, I need to put on the record one constituency case. I have a 75-year-old constituent who is stranded in South Africa, with flights out of the country cancelled. He has a pre-existing anxiety disorder and will run out of medication in a matter of days. He is struggling to find accommodation, and now has to find a local source of new prescription medication. If that man is suffering for the greater good, let my hon. Friend the Minister say so. The rights of individuals really matter; justice is about how individuals are treated. Yes, of course we should care about overall social outcomes, but the rights of individuals really matters, and how we treat those people really matters. That man matters. He should not be stuck in South Africa. He planned to go there and come back, and his plans have been cut short, causing him immense suffering.

There is no plausible path set out before us that leads to a genuine public health emergency, yet the Government are choosing to react in this way. As a result, I am afraid that the Government are choosing that downward path towards, frankly, hell—the hell of minute management of our lives by edict, with nothing that we can do about it and not even a say in advance in Parliament—and, incredibly, a clear majority of this House is going along with it. Some of us today have to take a decision to vote no to everything. I, for one, intend to chart a course towards heaven, and I hope that hon. Members will come with me.

Coronavirus Act 2020 (Review of Temporary Provisions) (No. 3)

Steve Baker Excerpts

Tuesday 19th October 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

I refer to the declarations I have made relating to the Covid Recovery Group. When we rammed this Act of Parliament through, I stood over there in Committee and said it would bring forward a dystopian society. I had no idea then of just how dystopian it would be. I could never have imagined that two friends could draw the attention of the police for going for a walk with a coffee. I could not have imagined the complexity of the rules around social and childcare bubbles, which caught out even the Prime Minister—or, if not caught out, at least drew the scrutiny of the media. We should never have got ourselves into a position where the rules were so complex that whether someone could have a friend round at Christmas was a question worthy of scrutiny in a major newspaper.

As for care homes, I will share a brief part of a quote from a constituent. He said:

“Just before my wife died was our 50th wedding anniversary and her 77th birthday. I was allowed to look through an almost closed window for the 50th but talking was almost impossible…on her birthday.”

Some of us have only been married for 25 years. Who among us could possibly imagine how that must have felt? I could read the rest of the quote, but there is not time and it is too upsetting.

My goodness, what a dystopian time we have been through. One of my greatest fears is about the fact that the Conservative party has been on this side of the House while we have done it, because only one party, with the possible exception of the Lib Dems on occasion, can really say it is a party of Government that stands for freedom, and that is the Conservative party. With great respect to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State—he is a great man who believes in liberty—it will be difficult for all the people who stayed in the Cabinet and took these decisions to say that they stand for freedom in the years ahead. I am absolutely determined to recover from the position we are and have been in, but we will need a Government who can stand for freedom and do it with a great deal of sincerity, for all my respect for my hon. and right hon. Friends on the Front Bench. I know this has been an extremely difficult time for them, but we need a change of heart.

I absolutely agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper). The substance of the motion before the House is relatively inoffensive, compared with what we have been through. I hope the House will not divide. If it does divide, I will not vote for the motion, but abstain, because we should do this sort of thing in a different way. I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for expiring the schedule 21 and schedule 22 powers.

The point is where we have come to. Of course the substance of the law matters, but it is about the presentation. There are people now outside who do not understand what we have done and have started falling into conspiracy theories, and it is hardly any wonder. I was accosted on the street outside by some people who had perhaps had a couple of drinks and recognised me. They were shouting at me about this Bill, which was not very welcome after the day we had had, but they have fallen into the idea that the Coronavirus Act 2020 has been used to lock us down, and as my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean said, it is not true; it is the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984, which still hangs over our heads like a sword of Damocles.

The Secretary of State, for all my faith in his good character, has only to walk into his office and sign a piece of paper and we will all be locked down at home again. It is the most extraordinary power for one man to hold over us all, and that must be changed. That is why I am grateful to Lord Sumption for giving me the outline of the 1984 Act reform that I hope the Secretary of State will look at. I appeal to him in good faith. He is a believer in liberty. We will need to change how the 1984 Act powers are exercised if we truly are believers in freedom, democracy and the rule of law.

It is time for these powers to lapse and be replaced with legislation that can be more considered. I hope that the legislation just goes through today because, as I say, it is relatively inoffensive, but we will need to turn the corner and show the public that we stand for freedom and that in the long run, after we have coped with coronavirus, their rights are sacrosanct and we will never, ever do to them again what we have done in the past couple of years.

Covid-19 Update

Steve Baker Excerpts

Tuesday 14th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

Among other things, my right hon. Friend is keeping covid status certification in reserve, and he is leaving mass asymptomatic testing in place, together with contact tracing. As my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) said, the public health powers are still there, of course allowing the Secretary of State to lock us down at the stroke of his pen without prior votes or any formal way of justifying the proportionality of those powers. When can we expect all those things to be dealt with, so that we can all have the certainty that will come from knowing that, thanks to the vaccine, we are living with an endemic disease, in the way that we live with the endemic disease flu, and we can all get on with our lives?

[Sajid Javid]

I know that my hon. Friend may not agree with every measure that the Government are keeping in place or have set out, but I hope that he agrees that at least the measures that I have set out—around making sure that we are vaccinating the public, offering vaccines to as many people as possible, having some kind of testing regime, and having some surveillance of the results of those tests to look out for any new variants—are the right measures and the kinds of things that need to be done as we live with covid-19.

Covid-19 Vaccinations: 12 to 15-year-olds

Steve Baker Excerpts

Monday 13th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I hope I addressed that question earlier. I think quite the opposite, and the reason I say that is that it is right that the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation has taken its time. It has looked at data from other countries that proceeded with this vaccination programme and has looked at data not just on first dose, but on second dose, which has only recently been made available. It is much better to be careful than to proceed with a vaccination programme in a way that may not be appropriate. We have some of the best clinical advice in the world. It is only right that we listen to that and proceed as carefully as we can as we transition this virus from pandemic to endemic.

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

Just returning to stigmatisation, will the Minister guarantee that a child’s ability to receive an education equally with their peers will never be linked to their vaccination status?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

My hon. Friend asks a really important question around vaccination status. I can certainly say to him that that will not be used in any way. The whole purpose of this is to accept the clinical advice and to protect children. It was remiss of me, in response to an earlier question, not to say that the CMOs looked very specifically at the mental health and other implications for the child, not for the rest of society.