Covid-19 Update — House of Commons, 2021-09-06
Topic: Health
Jonathan Michael Graham Ashworth (Labour, Centre-left): I thank the Minister for advance sight of his statement. Like him, I praise all our NHS staff. I particularly want to associate myself with the remarks about the safety of the vaccine for pregnant women Children’s health and wellbeing has always been a driving priority of mine. Children may not have been the face of this pandemic, but they have certainly been among its biggest victims. The record will show that I have been asking in this House about the vaccination of adolescents for some months. I of course understand the position of the JCVI and welcome the review on the wider implications for children’s wellbeing by the chief medical officers. Should vaccination be recommended and the chief medical officers do recommend vaccination, that will command our full support on the Labour Benches. If the chief medical officers recommend vaccination, will the Minister guarantee that our public health workforce, our health visitors and our school nurses, as well as primary care, will have the resources they need to roll out that vaccination Children are back to school. In Leicester, children have been back in school for two weeks. In Scotland, children have been back in school for some weeks also, putting upward pressure on infection rates. If the chief medical officers recommend vaccination, how long does the Minister think it will take to roll out that vaccination? Are we talking months? Are we talking weeks? Are we talking days? If he could give us an indication, I am sure we would all be grateful. The Education Secretary has removed many of the infection control mitigations in schools. We urged Ministers to use the summer holidays to install ventilation, air filtration units and carbon dioxide monitors in schools. How many schools have now had those systems installed The hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi) is the Minister for vaccines. Primary and secondary school children are due to receive a flu vaccine, yet not only is the NHS apparently running out of blood test tubes, with certain vital tests delayed, but we are now told that flu vaccination will be delayed, because deliveries are delayed by two weeks, and GPs are cancelling flu vaccination appointments. This is before we head into what could be one of the most difficult winters in living memory. What will the Minister do to get a grip of this situation and avoid a flu crisis this winter? If there is a delay in flu vaccines, does he expect that to knock on to any booster jab campaign? Less than a month ago, the Health Secretary said he wanted booster jabs to be given at the same time as flu jabs and he said that they would start this month Finally, we of course welcome the new funding for the second half of the financial year and we welcome that it would appear that Ministers have listened to our calls for the discharge to assess funding to be extended, but I think the whole House would agree that surely one of the most heartbreaking, and in my view frankly unforgivable, episodes in the pandemic was the failure to protect care homes and to put that protective ring around care homes as we were promised. If covid has taught us anything, it is that a long-term plan for social care is long overdue and that it should be funded in a fair way. The Minister, along with every Conservative Member, was elected on a manifesto that promised a social care plan and promised no rise in national insurance. The Prime Minister guaranteed no rise in national insurance, but we are told to expect, tomorrow, a rise in national insurance—a tax on workers to pay for a regressive social care policy that simply will not improve the care that people need and deserve. In this House, the Minister used to call national insurance a "tax on jobs". What would he call a manifesto-breaking national insurance rise now?