UK Military Personnel Serving Overseas: Vaccination

Tobias Ellwood Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)]

(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for Defence if he will make a statement on the vaccination of UK military personnel serving overseas.

[The Minister for the Armed Forces (James Heappey)]

As soon as our hugely successful covid vaccination programme was launched, I wanted to ensure that our armed forces would have access to vaccines as quickly as possible, so we tasked the Department with ensuring that nobody would be disadvantaged by serving our country abroad. This means people would be offered vaccinations no later than they would have at home, and that those who needed to would be vaccinated before they left the UK.

Our critical outputs, including the continuous-at-sea deterrent crew and the quick reaction alert air crew, have rightly been prioritised. We have also in recent days completed 100% vaccination for our carrier strike group. I can confirm today that sufficient vaccines for all of our people in all overseas locations have now been dispatched. We are in the process of getting the few remaining people who are awaiting their vaccines their jabs. For those on active operations overseas, we have administered first doses of vaccine to 95% of those eligible and 61% of them have had their second dose. I can assure the House that every single eligible person across Defence, at home or abroad, will have been offered at least their first vaccine dose by 19 July, in line with the national programme.

[Mr Ellwood]

I am grateful for that reply but it does miss out a lot of detail. It gives me no pleasure whatsoever during Armed Forces Week, when we celebrate the military’s invaluable contribution to our nation, to raise this urgent question as to why we do not have a bespoke vaccination programme for our personnel who are deployed overseas.

In our national battle to tackle covid here in the UK, we have relied on our military from the start—in building Nightingales, driving ambulances, mass testing and, of course, running hundreds of vaccination centres across the country—and yet, when we ask them to return to their day job, those deployed overseas are not fully vaccinated. A reported outbreak of 80 cases in our recent UN mission to Mali illustrates the dangerous consequences. This outbreak would have devastated our operational capability and, indeed, the safety of the mission.

It is standard protocol to inoculate prior to deployment. If we protect our troops against yellow fever, anthrax, malaria, typhoid and a host of other infectious diseases, why not covid when we have these vaccines now? Our NATO allies are doing just that. The USA, France, Holland and Germany all have fully vaccinated their deployed troops, so why have we not? I understand that our NATO partners have in fact expressed concern that the Queen Elizabeth battle group departed without all personnel having received two vaccines and, indeed, our Gulf allies have also registered their concern that our personnel based in their stations abroad are without the vaccines.

This is an easy call to get right, but it is also an irresponsible one to get wrong and arguably a potential breach of the armed forces covenant and our duty of care to our valiant armed forces. However, the picture would be incomplete without registering the MOD’s internal attempts to address this. We must make that clear, but I hope that Whitehall is now listening, and I am sure that the country would want to see key worker status granted to all personnel currently overseas. That is what would resolve this issue. With this challenge now out in the open, in supporting this call, can I ask the MOD to fully vaccinate all our sailors, soldiers and air personnel as a matter of urgency?

[James Heappey]

I thank my right hon. Friend for asking the urgent question. I have not had any representations from NATO partners or Gulf partners sharing any concerns over our vaccination programme, so he may wish to share with me or my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State any such representations that he has received so that we can discuss those with our colleagues in other Ministries of Defence. I am also slightly surprised that the MOD’s vaccination programme has become such a matter of urgent attention for him and others in the House, because we have had a series of parliamentary questions on this matter over the last six months, and in all of them, we have been very clear that the MOD’s position is that people would receive their vaccinations overseas in line with their age cohort here in the UK.

[Mr Ellwood]

That was wrong. It was absolutely wrong.

[James Heappey]

Whether that was right or wrong can be a matter of debate, but the MOD position has been very clear throughout. I happen to believe that it is the right decision, because there was no decision to prioritise other professions beyond those within the NHS—military medics, it is important to say, were all vaccinated as a matter of priority alongside their NHS colleagues while they were working in high-risk covid environments.

The other thing that I would just pick up on in my right hon. Friend’s response to my initial answer is his assertion that 80 people on our deployment to Mali had covid. That is simply not the case. The correct figure, as was answered in a parliamentary question last week, is that cumulatively, since the deployment began, 24 people have tested positive for covid. If you will indulge the detail of that, Madam Deputy Speaker, there were six positive tests in March, two in April and one in May for the Chinook detachment, and two in December, six in January, one in February and six in March for the long range reconnaissance group.