Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 23 December 2020
On Mr Cameron’s second question, I cannot provide any more information than I have provided so far. As I said, Matt Hancock and I have written to the JCVI to ask it to give consideration to the issue and to provide any further advice that it wants to offer. As soon as we have that, I will update members in what has become a regular weekly update to members when we have new information to impart. I expect that the four health ministers will discuss the matter when we meet tomorrow.
On the role of GPs, we have been working very closely with the Royal College of General Practitioners and the British Medical Association to ensure that the vaccination programme for the over-80s can be delivered partly in primary care physical settings and partly through primary care staff delivering the vaccine to people in that age group who live at home and for whom vaccination at home is the most appropriate way of delivering it to them. In addition, GPs who choose to do so will volunteer in our vaccination centres, and we have reached an agreement with them on the overall cost of that.
The GP practices are giving careful consideration to how they can manage to deliver the vaccination programme and to maintain their normal primary care service provision through extended hours or by other means. I am confident that the RCGP and the BMA are looking at that very closely—quite rightly, they share the concern of Mr Cameron and me on this—to ensure that standard, normal GP services are maintained while the additional work associated with vaccination is under way.
With regard to Mr Cameron’s question about the new variant of Covid-19, a great deal of work is under way to ensure that the current vaccines can deal with it; the expectation is that they can. Of course, vaccine researchers and manufacturers are well accustomed to dealing with variation in infection strains—they do that almost every year with respect to the flu virus, which mutates and changes its strains as each year passes. Changes are then made in the vaccine that we deploy as part of the seasonal flu programme.
That work is under way but, at this point, there is no evidence to suggest that the current vaccines will not be effective against the new strain. Of course, the key is to get on and vaccinate as many people as quickly as we can.