argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Coronavirus — House of Commons, 2021-06-16
Topic: Health
Matthew John David Hancock (Conservative, Centre-right): As so often, my right hon. Friend, who is one of the most astute medical practitioners in this House—crikey, I could get myself into trouble there, because all the medical practitioners in this House are astute, but he is also a public health expert. I will start again. My right hon. Friend’s point was a really good one and very astute. He is exactly right about our approach: the two-week review is a data review Up to around 10 days to a week before the decision making cut-off for the proposal to take step 4 on 21 June, it looked like hospitalisations were staying flat, despite rising case rates. We did not know whether that was because of a lag or because there was now going to be no cases turning into hospitalisations. That remains the case now for the link to the number of people dying, because the number of people dying each day in England is actually slightly falling at the moment—thank goodness —and there has not been a rise in the number of deaths following the rise in the case rates, which started about three weeks ago. Within a couple of weeks, we will know whether that continues to be flat or whether it rises a little. It has risen a little in Scotland; I just put that warning out there. That is precisely the sort of data that we will be looking at at the two-week point. We have been absolutely clear that the goal on which we hang the decision ahead of 19 July is one of delivering the vaccines, and we have a very high degree of confidence that we can deliver the vaccines that we think are needed in order to be able to take step 4 on 19 July I hope that was a clear and comprehensive answer, once I untangled myself from my initial response to my right hon. Friend.
Coronavirus — House of Commons, 2021-06-16
Topic: Health
Matthew John David Hancock (Conservative, Centre-right): No, because I think people understand that we are putting forward the moments by which we can and then will make assessments according to the data. We have done that throughout. I think people get that and they understood that ahead of 21 June. I think people are smart enough to understand that distinction After this four-week pause, we will be in a stronger position—because of the vaccination rollout that we have been discussing—to keep hospitalisations down, and so to live with this disease and take that final step on the road map Let me turn to the regulations themselves, which put the pause into effect by amending the expiry date of the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Steps) (England) Regulations 2021, so that they expire at midnight on the evening of 18 July. To reflect this change, we also need to align the dates on several other covid regulations that are essential for keeping us safe, including: the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Wearing of Face Coverings on Public Transport) (England) Regulations 2020; the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) (No. 3) Regulations, which give powers to manage local outbreaks by cancelling events and closing individual premises; and the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Local Authority Enforcement Powers and Amendment) (England) Regulations 2020, which give local authorities powers to enforce covid-secure measures for businesses. They will all be extended until midnight on 18 July. We do not want to extend these sets of regulations a day longer than we have to and have always said that we would ease restrictions as soon as we were able to safely to do so. Even though we have put forward these regulations to pause step 4, we are also putting forward regulations to ease restrictions in some areas, allowing us to remove the 30-person gathering limit for weddings, receptions and commemorative events—subject, of course, to social distancing measures—and to run another phase of our pilots for large events at higher capacity, including some, such as the Wimbledon finals, at full capacity. Even though we have not been able to take the full step 4 as we wanted, the regulations will allow us to make some cautious changes that will bring some joy to many people and move us slightly further down the road to recovery.
Coronavirus — House of Commons, 2021-06-16
Topic: Health
Matthew John David Hancock (Conservative, Centre-right): I would dearly love that, and I will talk to my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House, who, as I well know, is an enthusiast. I would love it if we could make that so—let us see. Finally, I want to tell the House about the results of our consultation on vaccination as a condition of deployment in care homes. After careful consultation, we have decided to take this proposal forward, to protect residents. The vast majority of staff in care homes are already vaccinated, but not all of them are. We know that the vaccine protects not only you, but those around you. Therefore we will be taking forward the measures to ensure the "mandation" as a condition of deployment for staff in care homes, and we will consult on the same approach in the NHS, in order to save lives and protect patients from disease.
Coronavirus — House of Commons, 2021-06-16
Topic: Health
Matthew John David Hancock (Conservative, Centre-right): No, I do not agree with mandatory vaccination of the public, but for those who have a duty to care, in an environment that includes some of the most vulnerable people in the country, I think this is a sensible and reasonable step in order to save lives.
Coronavirus — House of Commons, 2021-06-16
Topic: Health
Mark James Harper (Conservative, Centre-right): The Secretary of State will also be aware that staff who provide domiciliary care in people’s homes—they potentially provide care to many people, going to many homes during the day—are also caring and present a similar challenge. It would be preferable, in the first instance, if we could get those vaccination rates up by education and persuasion. I am prepared, if that is not possible, and following the precedent we have in the NHS for those who perform operations and have to be vaccinated against hepatitis, to agree to this matter, but there is a real issue here with the millions of people who provide domiciliary care, who are often employed directly. How is that going to work and provide the level of protection required?
Coronavirus — House of Commons, 2021-06-16
Topic: Health
Matthew John David Hancock (Conservative, Centre-right): Yes, we do propose to consult on this point, alongside the consultation on mandatory vaccination as a condition of deployment in the NHS. As my right hon. Friend rightly says, this is a complicated operational matter. The principle of vaccination for those in a caring responsibility is already embedded, as he says; there is a history going back more than a century of vaccination being required in certain circumstances. I think these are reasonable circumstances, so we will go ahead for those who work in care homes and we will consult about those in domiciliary care and those working in the NHS. However, I have no proposals for going, and would not expect us to go, any wider.
Coronavirus — House of Commons, 2021-06-16
Topic: Health
Steven John Baker (Conservative, Centre-right): I can understand why we would want especially to protect people in those circumstances, of course, but will the Secretary of State explain why it is not possible to maintain their right to choose not to be vaccinated by instead, for example, requiring daily lateral flow tests for workers in those industries?
Coronavirus — House of Commons, 2021-06-16
Topic: Health
Matthew John David Hancock (Conservative, Centre-right): As somebody who grew up right on the Welsh border, I entirely understand that. I am working with Baroness Morgan, the new Health Minister in the Welsh Government, to ensure that we have the interoperability that the hon. Gentleman calls for. That is a significant piece of work that is under way. We need to sort this for vaccine data flows, and frankly all health data flows, across the border, and use this particularly acute need to change the policy and practices, to sort this out once and for all The regulations before the House today are there in order to pursue our goal, as throughout, to work to protect lives and get us out of the pandemic as soon as is safely possible. I commend the motion to the House.
Coronavirus — House of Commons, 2021-06-16
Topic: Health
Mark James Harper (Conservative, Centre-right): On the point about the restrictions, I know that those discussions are going on because I have seen documents from within Government with very detailed suggestions about what measures may continue. I asked the Secretary of State about this when he was in the Commons earlier this week, and he did not rule out bringing in restrictions this winter. That is partly why some Conservative Members are very concerned and why we are not going to vote for these regulations today. However, I want to take the right hon. Gentleman back to his comments on what Chris Hopson said about the fact that the NHS is very busy at the moment. There is a danger here. I am very sympathetic to colleagues who work in the NHS, who have done a fantastic job, but we cannot get to a point where we restrict and manage society in order to manage NHS waiting lists. That is not the right way round. The NHS is there to serve society. If we need to enable it to do that, we have to think of a way of doing it other than putting restrictions on the rest of society. That is not a sustainable or a desirable position, but it is the logical consequence of what Chris Hopson was saying earlier this month.
Coronavirus — House of Commons, 2021-06-16
Topic: Health
Andrew William Murrison (Conservative, Centre-right): On the subject of the poorest and most disadvantaged, what does the right hon. Gentleman then make of the recent observation by the chief medical officer on the annual toll taken by the ill effects of smoking? He said that because he wanted to compare and contrast the number of people that we are losing, sadly, to covid with those we lose every single year to the ill effects of smoking. We have been prepared to countenance some swingeing restrictions on all our liberties for the past 15 months; banning smoking, for example, would be far less restrictive by comparison. It is smoking that is driving up health inequalities, but I have not heard him comment on that yet.
Coronavirus — House of Commons, 2021-06-16
Topic: Health
Andrew William Murrison (Conservative, Centre-right): With respect, the right hon. Gentleman has missed the point. Perhaps I did not make myself clear enough. The chief medical officer was introducing that because he was trying to explain that we are going to have to live with some level of risk. We need to have a discussion about the public’s appetite for risk if we are to live with covid. The reason he cited smoking and the figure of 90,000 a year is that it approximates to the number of people we have lost from covid so far in this pandemic. Does the right hon. Gentleman not agree that we need to have a discussion about where we are prepared to pitch this? Is it 22,000, which is the figure for a bad flu year? Is it 90,000, which is the number we lose every single year from the ill effects of smoking?
Coronavirus — House of Commons, 2021-06-16
Topic: Health
Aaron Stuart Bell (Conservative, Centre-right): I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way; we were in the Science and Technology Committee this morning. Does he share my disquiet at the fact that the vaccine effectiveness numbers that Public Health England has published—96% effectiveness against hospitalisation from two doses of Pfizer, and 92% from Oxford-AstraZeneca—are much higher than the numbers that have been plugged into the models used by Imperial and the London School of Hygiene and Medical to underpin the data that the Government are relying on?
Coronavirus — House of Commons, 2021-06-16
Topic: Health
Luke Morgan Evans (Conservative, Centre-right): For over 800 years, this House has been making decisions on risk, be it sending men and women to war, providing financial support or instigating reform in trade or even laws, and tonight’s vote boils down to an assessment of risk. Essentially, there are three options: we open on the 21st, we delay or we close and put more lockdown measures back in If we accept the premise that we cannot get rid of covid, we can disregard the reintroduction of lockdown rules on the basis that it is too risky to the economy, non-covid health and education. I do not think that even a tiered approach to deal with regional variation would be stomached by the public. That leaves us with two options: open as planned or delay I checked the data on the dashboard this morning, as many Members have, and it shows that the seven-day increase of cases, the average, is 38.8% and hospitalisation is increasing by 22%, but we also know that we have vaccinated 79% of the population with one dose and 57% with two doses. We also know that no measure is 100% effective, that no mask is 100% effective and that no vaccine is 100% effective, but we know that putting those measures together mitigates the risk That is all against the backdrop of a delta variant that is 50% to 70% more contagious than the alpha variant at Christmas, which in turn was 50% to 70% more virulent than the original variant. This House is therefore being asked to make a judgment call: carry on opening as we are, risking further spread and increased hospitalisations, or buy time, see the trend, get more people vaccinated and reassess but, of course, at the expense of businesses and freedom This is another Sophie’s choice. I know from my constituents that they will not thank this House for a four-week delay, but they will not forgive this House if further lockdowns return. I will vote to support the motions today, but they still leave certain sectors as zombie industries: not officially closed but not open, because there are not enough customers. For the travel, events and wedding industries, and for the night-time economy, I urge the Government to consider sector-specific support. Some might mistake my words for the sound of a risk-averse man, or a doctor who thinks too much about health. In my day job, my entire career has been spent managing risk, from dealing with people’s cholesterol to working out whether a headache is stress or a brain tumour. I do that openly and frankly with my patients, and now it is what we need from the Government: a debate on the acceptable level of covid risk There were 1,500 deaths and 25,000 deaths or serious injuries on UK roads last year. As a society, we accept this risk. We could ban all road travel and stop all deaths, but of course we would lose the economic benefits and our freedoms. During the next month, I urge the Government to bring forward a debate on the risk this House is prepared to accept from covid. After all, as I said at the start of this speech, the House has been deciding this for 800 years. Why should it change now?
Coronavirus — House of Commons, 2021-06-16
Topic: Health
Christopher Mark Clarkson (Conservative, Centre-right): Throughout, this process has been heartbreaking, debilitating and wearing, so to be here again talking about a further four-week extension is the worst possible outcome for so many of us—it is so, so disheartening. However, I say that knowing that I will be supporting the Government tonight. Unfortunately, my constituency neighbour the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer) is no longer in his place, but he made an eloquent speech talking about why he could not support these measures on the grounds of civil liberties and I wanted to remind him that about a quarter of his seat is in the city of Salford, where I was a councillor for a while. The city’s motto is, "Salus populi suprema lex" or, "The welfare of the people is the highest law". The infection rates in Greater Manchester are some of the highest in the entire country, with Manchester and Salford having the highest rates. His seat straddles those areas, so he cannot say that he is putting the welfare of the people in his constituency at the highest level I wish to turn to something that was brought up by the hon. Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen) when she was talking about getting the politics out of this issue. I completely agree with that, which is why it was so frustrating yesterday that in the Manchester Evening News the lead member for health in Rochdale Borough Council was dismissing the vaccination programme as a gimmick and a slogan, and was hinting that the Government were withholding vaccines from certain areas. Anybody with the slightest idea about how logistics work knows that the programme is rate-limited purely by supply. I say to Members: we have four weeks to nail this down. We cannot have another extension. We cannot keep going through this process. We are going to have to work together. We are going to have stop sniping at each other and trying to make little jibes to score a little point here or there. There are people who are depending on us to do the right thing now.
Coronavirus — House of Commons, 2021-06-16
Topic: Health
Robert Andrew Raymond Syms (Conservative, Centre-right): The pandemic has been a massive challenge to the British Government. I happen to think that, given the uncertainties that they have faced, the Prime Minister and senior Ministers have done a pretty good job. In terms of the vaccination programme, they have certainly proved to the world that Britain can go alone and do a lot to safeguard its population when it uses its science and its ability to get things done When the road map was unveiled, I thought to myself, "At least that stops me voting against the Government again"— until we get to the point when the Government have delayed opening up. I do think that this is a matter of balance and judgment. My view is that most of the senior Ministers who took this decision need a damn good holiday. If we look at the data and at what is happening in the country, the restrictions are totally out of kilter with the sense of the problem Let me take the south-west of England. There are 5.6 million people in the south-west of England.
Coronavirus — House of Commons, 2021-06-16
Topic: Health
Robert Andrew Raymond Syms (Conservative, Centre-right): There are 5.6 million people in the south-west of England. There are 23 people in hospital. There are two in ICU. In Dorset, where there are nearly 1 million people, we have one person in hospital. Yet there are hundreds of couples who want to get married, businesses that want to be viable, and people who want to get their lives back in order. I just think that the balance is wrong. Most of the population have now been vaccinated. We may not totally break the link with people going into hospital, but there are more than 100,000 beds in the NHS. One per cent. are taken by covid patients. Now it might go up to 2%. We already have experts on TV saying, "In order for the NHS to catch up, we may well have to keep restrictions for longer." I think that is unacceptable to the British people. As a Conservative, I am perfectly willing to accept restrictions when hundreds and thousands of people are dying and we are dealing with a virus that we do not understand, but we have sort of got to the point where we have won the battle. There will be variants. There will be challenges, but we have to get on with normal life The points made by my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) are perfectly right. If it is simply that we need to get second doses in—if that had been explained—we might be a little more relaxed. If we look at the explanatory notes, though, we will see that we have a review of data in two or four weeks’ time, and not necessarily a release date. We need to get people’s freedoms back. We cannot save everybody, but what we have done is save thousands and thousands of lives. Now we need to safeguard employment, safeguard businesses and safeguard people’s personal relationships I began by saying that the Government have done a pretty good job and that the vaccine programme is outstanding, but we have to now take the dividend from that to get people back to normal life. When they queued up with their enthusiasm to get that jab in their arm, they thought that that meant that things would get back to normal. They did not expect that they would be in further restrictions which would go on and on and on. I think we should have lifted all restrictions on 21 June. I hope and I pray that, in two weeks’ time, the Government will look at the data again and set people free.
Coronavirus — House of Commons, 2021-06-16
Topic: Health
Simon Richard James Fell (Conservative, Centre-right): I do not think anyone envies the tasks and decisions that this Government and this Prime Minister have to make. We have a vaccination programme that is the envy of much of the world, with 30 million adults now having had two jabs, which offer 90%-plus protection against hospitalisation from the delta variant. We also have a road map that is clear and is linked to the success of that same vaccination programme, but against that backdrop, we are being asked to approve a further delay today I spoke to local health leaders in Cumbria and in Barrow and Furness over the past few days, and the message from them was clear: they support this delay. Our director of public health was stark: because we are trying to cover and backfill 5 million people on an NHS waiting list, even a small fraction of covid-19 patients going into hospital risks the NHS being overwhelmed. On that basis, and on the basis of the rationale advanced by the Secretary of State, I support these measures as one final push—one last heave—before we return our freedoms However, we need to be absolutely clear about what this delay means. It extends impositions on our liberty, our livelihoods, people’s health and the future of young people. While the state has a duty to protect its citizens, our objective cannot be zero deaths. As my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Miriam Cates) so eloquently wrote this week—I apologise for bastardising her words—"We don’t live to avoid death; we live to enjoy life," and it has to be on that basis that we make the final judgment to unlock next month.
Coronavirus — House of Commons, 2021-06-16
Topic: Health
Steven John Baker (Conservative, Centre-right): I am listening carefully to my hon. Friend, and it is a good argument for voting for these restrictions, of course it is, but has he considered the possibility that, very sadly, the NHS will now be under pressure for years, dealing with the backlog?