Covid-19: Vaccination of Children — [Dame Angela Eagle in the Chair]

Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall at 10:01 am on 21 September 2021.

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Photo of Chris Green Chris Green Conservative, Bolton West 10:01, 21 September 2021

It is a pleasure to follow Jim Shannon, who made so many important points. I also appreciate and thank my hon. Friend Miriam Cates for leading on the debate; I know many people right across the country are grateful for it, because this is an area of immense concern as their children are being vaccinated or not, as the case may be.

The country has gone through a difficult time over a long period. Who would have thought in March last year that we would be in this position now, debating whether 12-year-olds would be vaccinated to deal with this disease? At the beginning, there was very little certainty or scientific understanding of what we were facing. The scientific understanding has carried on apace; there has been a huge global effort to increase it, and on the medical side there has been a huge advance in how we treat people.

Covid is far less dangerous now than it was at the beginning, and we need to be clear about that, including when we look at the Government’s statistics on how deaths and other concerns are presented. To this day, they still show the overall death rate as including those deaths in the first and second waves. That makes us believe that we have not rolled out an effective vaccines programme and that doctors and people in hospitals are not far more effective at treating the disease itself. We are in a far better position, and that must be more clearly understood.

Initially, in January this year and December last year, the vaccine roll-out was pitched as protecting the most vulnerable: those who are old and those who have particular health challenges. Then, before we knew it, the ages were coming down and down. We got to age 18, and at the same time it was not a single vaccination, but a double vaccination that would give people the necessary protection. Now we are in the position of giving a booster vaccination to people in the near future. Initially it is being proposed for the over-50s, but will that come down as well?

The point I am making is that we have not been given any certainty over what the Government and their advisers deem to be success. It seems as though, because the system has not been given clarity about what success is, it carries on and on and the next group, the next group and the next group receive the vaccination. However, we know that in the first and second waves the connection between transmission, hospitalisation and death was strong. We know from Government data that, in the third wave, the connection between transmission, hospitalisation and death is fundamentally broken; it is nothing compared with what it was at the beginning. Our approach to covid therefore ought to reflect those facts.