[Relevant documents: e-petition 586017, Do not vaccinate children against COVID-19 until Phase 3 trials are complete, e-petition 594272, Recall Parliament to debate vaccination of children before this is rolled out, and e-petition 589254, Offer the Covid-19 vaccine to under 18s.]
Before we begin, I encourage Members to wear masks when they are not speaking. This is in line with current Government guidance and that of the House of Commons Commission. Please also give each other and members of staff space when seated, and when entering and leaving the Chamber.
That this House has considered the vaccination of children against covid-19.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Angela. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting this important debate, and draw Members’ attention to the three e-petitions that relate to this topic, which have amassed more than 100,000 signatures between them.
Vaccination has transformed public health over the last two centuries. As a science teacher, I remember teaching students about the amazing work of Edward Jenner, who famously developed the smallpox inoculation. Two hundred and fifty years later, vaccinations have again ridden to our rescue with the rapid development and roll-out of covid vaccines across the UK. The phenomenal success of the vaccination programme can be seen clearly in the data. Of the 51,000 covid-related deaths from January to July this year, 76% were of unvaccinated people, and a further 14% had received only a single dose. Just 59 deaths—0.1%—were of double-vaccinated adults with no other risk factors, and 92% of adults now have covid antibodies.
Those figures are a ringing endorsement of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation’s strategy to recommend vaccination based on the medical benefits and risks to the individuals concerned. The Government have repeatedly defended both this strategy and the independence of the JCVI, and resisted calls to prioritise the vaccination of teachers or police officers over those at higher risk of serious illness. That was the right approach, and the UK has led the world in falling rates of deaths and hospitalisations.
It was therefore surprising, to say the least, when the Government put political pressure on the JCVI to quickly reach a decision about the vaccination of children. On 3 September 2021, the JCVI announced that it was unable to recommend the mass vaccination of healthy 12 to 15-year-olds. The reason was that, although there are marginal health benefits of covid vaccination to children based on the known risks of the vaccine, there is considerable uncertainty regarding the magnitude of the potential harms, such as the long-term effects of myocarditis.
My hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Miriam Cates) is making an excellent speech, and she is quite right that the Government’s vaccination roll-out programme has been very positive. However, does she share my concerns about the message it sends out regarding parental authority if children as young as 12 are allowed to challenge their parents’ decision regarding their vaccination?
I agree with my hon. Friend: there are some very difficult issues around parental consent and the vaccine, and whether any child can know enough about the potential benefits and risks. This is going to be a very difficult question for schools, health authorities and parents. I will say more about that later on.
The advice being given out on consent forms states that you get to see your family doctor. However, when I and my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Steve Brine) challenged the former vaccines Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi), on the ability of families to access their family doctor to get advice about vaccines, he could not and would not give an assurance that families could have that advice. Is not such access necessary, especially if the Government are stating on the vaccine form that you do have that access?
Order. Before I call Miriam to continue, Members ought to realise that when they say “you” they are referring to the Chair. Can we please try to get the formalities right? I know that it is less important on Zoom, but we are now back.
My hon. Friend is right. It is widely known that access to GPs is challenging at the moment, and that presents challenges in this situation. It is widely understood that if a child can consent, contrary to parental consent, that is not a tick-box exercise; it is a matter for a medical professional to assess whether the child is competent to consent. If there are problems accessing GPs, there are clear issues here.
There is no rush to roll out the vaccine, and there is no evidence that schools drive transmission. Indeed, recorded covid cases are now at their lowest level since June, despite schools having been open for two weeks. It is also unlikely that vaccinating children will have a major impact on infection rates in the population as a whole, with the JCVI saying that
“the committee is of the view that any impact on transmission may be relatively small, given the lower effectiveness of the vaccine against infection with the Delta variant.”
However, instead of accepting the JCVI’s assessment and waiting for more evidence to emerge, the Government asked the chief medical officer urgently to review the decision based on the wider benefits to children, including from education. Last week, the CMO announced that he would recommend child vaccinations on the basis of these wider benefits.
That decision is a marked departure from the principle of vaccinating people for their own medical benefit, because those wider issues—educational disruption and concerns around mental health—are the consequences of policy decisions and are not scientific inevitabilities. Children in the UK have already missed more education than children in almost any other country in Europe, despite comparable death rates. Since January 2020, British children have lost on average 44% of school days to lockdown and isolation. That is not a consequence of covid infections in children, but rather a result of policy decisions to close schools and isolate healthy children.
Does my hon. Friend recognise that the Government, in their approach to lockdown, are creating some of the problems they believe make the situation worse? Weight Watchers and other organisations have said that people coming to them have put on an average of about 6 to 8 lb in weight, and are therefore physically more vulnerable now to covid and other health problems than they were before the pandemic.
My hon. Friend is absolutely right and I am sure we can all empathise with those who have put on some lockdown pounds. A study, I think last week, showed that countries where over 50% of the adult population is overweight have experienced 10 times the death rate. A really effective way of reducing our risk in future would be to divert some of the money we are spending on testing asymptomatic people into drives against obesity and for exercise. That is an excellent point.
Even now, as adults, we are able to move freely from home to work, to Parliament and to the pub with no restrictions, yet children are still subject to asymptomatic testing, and many are being forced to wear masks in school and are missing out on important opportunities. We cannot expect our children to face greater restrictions than we ourselves are willing to bear. As a mother, I have despaired as I have watched the impact of those restrictions on my children and others. The stories that I have heard from constituents, particularly the parents of disabled children and those with additional needs, are horrifying. Millions of families have had to endure this. I pay tribute to UsforThem, which is working tirelessly to stand up for children and campaign for their lives to be allowed to return to normal.
What has saddened me most is the negative attitude to children that seems to have pervaded so much of our public discourse—especially the view that teenagers have behaved irresponsibly throughout the pandemic. That view is just not borne out by evidence. A study by King’s College London shows that, despite half of adults saying that young people have been selfish by ignoring restrictions, all age groups have been “remarkably compliant” and perceptions of selfishness are driven by “fake stereotypes”.
We seem to have forgotten what it means to be a child. We have forgotten that playing with other children, taking risks, feeling valued and enjoying physical contact with others are vital to healthy development. As a society, I fear that we are becoming a bit like Grandma from Roald Dahl’s “George’s Marvellous Medicine”:
9:47 am
Karl MᶜCartney (Lincoln) (Con)
It gives me deep and great pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Dame Angela. I compliment my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Miriam Cates) on securing the debate.
Many of us, when we come to put a speech together, think of different ways and processes to do it. Some use the rule of three, and I want to refer today to three words that I hope my hon. Friend the Minister and her colleagues in Government take notice of: “Do no harm.”
Regardless of the chief medical officer’s overruling of the JCVI, I would say that when it comes to our nation’s children and young people, the people in these roles should remember that their actions should do no harm. Our colleagues in Government—whether newly appointed or not—should also be mindful, in respect of the electorate’s children, that they should do no harm. The new Minister will be aware of the strength of feeling displayed to her predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi), and the Government in the recent urgent question on covid passports. It is, again, a fallacy that the direction that the Government wish to take will protect our children, especially as 50% to 70% of them are likely already to have contracted and survived covid-19, according to the Office for National Statistics. Are we really showing that we are doing no harm?
We are told that any vaccination programme would not negate potential future school closures, so what is the point? Where is the political backbone? Is the Government’s plan that any future upsurge in age 12-to-15 cases could be ascribed to an epsilon or a zeta variant, or perhaps an eta or a theta variant? Will anyone give an iota of credence to such an occurrence after what we have seen with hospital transference to care homes and the subsequent surge in cases in our older generation, and with the recent vaccinations and the delta variant that has emerged? We should be mindful as politicians on both sides of the House, and I note at this point that there are not even three Opposition representatives on the other side of the Chamber, although I do see that the Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall), is in her place. We need to do no harm for myriad, if not a veritable plethora of, reasons.
I turn now to the so-called Gillick principle. As no trials that have been made public are definitive, I fail to see how any child below 16 can be fully informed and, on being fully informed, one would have to say that their teachers and headteachers cannot be either on the safety or otherwise of the vaccines, in particular in the light of the heart impacts on young males and the reported effects in more than 35,000 females of reproductive age reported in the UK national media this very last weekend. Can the chief medical officers and the JCVI, after their recent decision-making process, hold themselves to the maxim that they will do no harm?
I congratulate the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Miriam Cates) on bringing forward the debate. We had a discussion beforehand about her ideas for the thrust of the debate, and I have to say that my ideas concur with hers. Much of what I will say has been put forward already.
It is good to see the Minister in her place. I wish her well in her new role. I look forward to working with her on issues that we will find we have an interest in. I am also pleased to see the shadow Minister in her place. She and I have many things in common, and one is Leicester City football club. We are perhaps not doing as well at the moment as we could do, but we look forward to better days in the future.
My boys are grown up and I am now at the grandparent stage. I do not have as much of a role to play in the childminding as my wife does, but I understand that this morning she started childminding at 5 am, which is an early slot, because the two boys’ parents are working, one from 5 am and the other coming back at 8 am. I know that Government have always been of the opinion that families are core and central to society, and that is what I want to see as well.
Of my grandchildren, the two biggest girls have isolated on two or three occasions. I am glad to say that they have never had covid, but none the less that is the system: if one child in the class takes it, the whole class is out. I concur with the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge that we need a better system so that we do not necessarily have to go to those lengths every time.
I am vaccinated, and very pleased to be so. I believe in the effectiveness of the vaccine, but I also believe in reasoned parental consent. I believe that parents have a right to determine the best course of action, in co-ordination with medical staff on best practice. I put questions about this to the former vaccines Minister, the right hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi), last week and the week before in the Chamber. I respect him greatly, because he is very good at his job and committed. However, I was not totally convinced by his answers. I say that respectfully because I was not sure that the final decision would always lie with the parents.
Karl MᶜCartney
I picked up on the hon. Gentleman’s comments earlier about being sociable and being back in this place, and I did not want him to sit down having made a speech without being intervened on, as he is probably one of the most social Members across the House. Well done.
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. Our friendship goes back to when our offices used to be across from each other on the same corridor, and I am very pleased to renew it again in this House.
I believe that we have seen a decline in covid due to the vaccine, and the benefits are clear to see. However, from a child’s perspective the tale is very different, and parental consent, hand in hand with medical guidance in specific cases, must be the way we move forward. I believe that is what we should be doing. I am pleased to have had the debate and I thank the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge again for securing it. I look forward to other contributions, which I hope will endorse what we have all said.
10:01 am
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Paediatrician and JCVI member Adam Finn wrote in The Sunday Times that a high proportion of myocarditis patients showed
“significant changes of the heart. It is perfectly possible that these changes will resolve completely over time. But it is also possible that they may evolve into longer-term changes.
Until three to six months have passed, this remains uncertain, as does what impact on health any persistent changes may have.”
According to the JCVI, for every 1 million healthy children vaccinated, two intensive care unit admissions will be prevented, and three to 17 cases of myocarditis caused. With two doses, that rises to between 15 and 51 cases—finely balanced, indeed.
There is no rush to roll out the vaccine to children. We know that children are not at risk from covid; teachers are no more at risk than the rest of the population; the vast majority of vulnerable adults have been vaccinated; over half of children already have antibodies; and there is no evidence that schools drive transmission.
According to the Government’s modelling, vaccinating children could save 41 days of schooling per 1,000 children between October and March. That equates to an average of just 15 minutes of education saved per child over this period—surely an insignificant amount, and negligible when we account for the time it takes to vaccinate and the subsequent days off school to recover from potential side effects. There is a much simpler way to stop harmful educational disruption, and that is to follow the advice of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and end the mass testing of asymptomatic children. This unevidenced and unethical policy is costing tens of millions of pounds a week—I would be grateful if the Minister could confirm the exact cost—and is continuing to disrupt education. Even the CMO acknowledges that a vaccination programme alone will not stop school closures. Perhaps the Minister could clarify how the Government intend to end educational disruption.
On the potential mental health benefits from reducing the fear of covid, it is not covid infection that is making children fearful; it is the uncertainty, frustration, loneliness and anxiety that they experience as a result of lockdowns and harmful messages such as, “Don’t kill granny.” Children need not fear catching covid, but they have every right to fear policy decisions that cause them significant harm, and sadly we cannot vaccinate against those.
None the less, the decision has been made, and we have to be very clear that the risks to children, both from covid and from vaccines, are tiny. Concerns should now focus on making sure that the necessary safeguards are put in place as vaccination is rolled out. The previous vaccines Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi), assured MPs that there will be no differential treatment of children in schools on the basis of their vaccination status. That is crucial, because any suggestion that unvaccinated young people may be denied education or be subjected to social disadvantage will inhibit the ability of both parents and children to make a free and objective decision. While I appreciate Ministers’ commitments, children already face discrimination in some schools over mask wearing and testing.
We must also make sure that travel rules that differentiate between vaccinated and unvaccinated children do not amount to coercion when parents are making a decision. Can the Minister say how we will ensure that there is no discrimination in practice as well as in theory?
Vaccination must be a free and informed decision. Choosing to have or not to have the vaccine are both perfectly reasonable and sensible decisions where children are concerned. We must ensure that correct and impartial information is communicated and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) said, that there is access to health professionals where necessary. Parental consent must also be respected. Much has been said on this subject, but the heart of the matter is that parental responsibility and authority are foundational to society.
I am optimistic that these protections can and will be put in place. None the less, the way that the decision to vaccinate healthy 12 to 15-year-olds has been made should give us pause for thought. For no other cohort have the Government questioned the JCVI’s advice. Why have we departed from this stance when it comes to children and looked for reasons other than direct medical benefit to press ahead? When there are concerns about the future health of our children, why have we not waited for more evidence to emerge? I fear that this situation, rather than being an isolated incident, epitomises a worrying attitude to children that has been evident since the start of the pandemic.
Throughout the past 18 months, “protect the vulnerable” has been our clarion call. We have rightly made significant efforts to protect elderly people and those who are particularly susceptible to covid, but children, who cannot speak out, do not own property, and have no legal agency, are also very vulnerable. Yet during the pandemic, we have asked this group of vulnerable people to make huge sacrifices to protect the rest of us. The harms of lockdown for our children are significant and, for many, will be irreversible: lost education, missed opportunities, abuse and horrific online harms. The number of children presenting in A&E with acute mental health conditions has risen by 50% since the start of the pandemic.
A climate of fear and uncertainty has robbed children of the structure, routine and security that they need to thrive and has placed on them a heavy emotional burden from inferring that they may be responsible for the deaths of those they love. We have pretended that online learning is somehow a substitute for being in schools, and closed our eyes to the consequences of social isolation for children and young people.
Of course, we should raise our children to take responsibility for their actions, but as adults we should always shoulder the greater burden. We have imposed absurd rules on our young people, right down to deciding whom they can play with at playtime and whether they are allowed to change for PE.
However, we have not seen that much action to urge adults to take responsibility for their own covid risk by, for example, losing weight or exercising—something that would have had a far greater impact on our rates of hospitalisation and death.
“‘You know what’s the matter with you?’ the old woman said, staring at George over the rim of the teacup with those bright wicked little eyes. ‘You’re growing too fast. Boys who grow too fast become stupid and lazy.’
‘But I can’t help it if I’m growing fast, Grandma,’ George said.
‘Of course you can,’ she snapped. ‘Growing’s a nasty childish habit.’”
Things did not end well for Grandma, and things do not bode well for us if we fail to understand the nature and importance of childhood. Children are not disease spreaders, they are not a buffer for our healthcare system, and they are not an economic inconvenience. They are a blessing, they are our hope for the future, and their nurture and welfare should be our primary responsibility.
I am heartened by the care that has so far been taken by the JCVI, the chief medical officer and Ministers to reassure children and parents about the decision to vaccinate our young people, but looking forward we must recommit to putting the genuine and long-term interests of our youngest and most vulnerable citizens at the front and centre of policy making and prioritise their welfare as we recover from the pandemic.
Vaccine passports are not a first line of defence against a potential so-called winter wave of coronavirus, as Downing Street spokesmen are reported to have said. Our children of 12 to 15, like their older siblings and other under-25s who frequent nightclubs, bars and restaurants, are not to be used as a second line of defence either. I urge the Minister and her colleagues in Government to remember to do no harm. There is no medium or long-term study data. I admire Chris Whitty and his colleagues for many things that they have done in the past 18 months. However, citing educational disruption, or the fear of more of it, as a justification for child vaccination against JCVI advice seems a little desperate, as far as I am concerned.
We were told that all those at risk needed to be vaccinated. They have been. Many others have caught and survived covid-19. What real justification is there now to vaccinate those under 40 at all, some would ask? We have had millions of various vaccinations. How many of those under 40 without any underlying health issues have died or been hospitalised purely because of covid-19? So why are our children still taking tests after a whole summer of not doing so, as has been referred to? Is it perhaps because there are thousands, if not millions, of the tests sitting in warehouses? What sort of reason is that for imposing this sort of regime on them?
Are we ensuring that we are doing no harm? Are the zealots in the civil service, the NHS and Government going to stigmatise and demonise any parent who expresses concern about ensuring vaccination of our young children through fear and perhaps even lies, and about taking a vaccine that has had no long-term testing and does not stop someone getting the virus or passing it on? “Do no harm” starts to have a very hollow ring.
If covid risk for young people is much lower, while with vaccination there are heart risks for males—that is a real concern—and reproductive females are suffering side-effects, how does the Minister square that circle that we should do no harm to the young of the UK? That next generation will be paying for this Government’s and the Minister’s decisions for many, many years and, I fear, perhaps in more ways than one.
I am encouraged by the news this morning that 89.1% now have double jabs and 81.3% have single jabs. We are moving in the right direction, so there is good news on the vaccine front. The medical evidence is by no means empirical at this stage. There are strong suggestions that
“new scientific advice does not endorse universal vaccination of all children over 12 in the UK”.
If scientists are saying that, we cannot ignore them. They are saying:
“The latest advice recommends that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine should be offered to a wider number of children directly at risk from covid-19, and to children living with an immunosuppressed person. There is very good evidence that children who have covid-19 are much less likely to develop severe symptoms and much less likely to die from the disease than adults. While rare in children, serious outcomes from covid-19 have been studied in this group. The strongest risk factor is having some underlying health problems, including neurological and cardiac conditions or complex neuro-disability.”
The hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge referred to those with disabilities. Reuben, the son of my hon. Friend the Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson), came home from school 10 days ago. Out of his class of 28, 26 children had covid. They had to self-isolate because my hon. Friend has asthma, and his case is quite serious. While we have to do things, there must genuinely be a better way. It is not the Minister’s responsibility to respond for education, but I am keen to find out what discussions she has had with Education Ministers on this issue, and how we could better handle it. That is what I would like to see.
My parliamentary private secretary has two children. One comes home from school and has to isolate because someone in the class has got covid, though they have not. They potentially bring it into the house. I cannot understand, and neither can she, why they cannot go back to school. They have to isolate from the classroom but can interact with the family, including a sister who is in a different class. We need to have a better way of looking at that.
In my opinion, some parents may decide, following medical advice, that the jab is the safer option. The starting point must be that it is a matter of opting in, not opting out. I have read some incredibly interesting data from Israel that suggests that immunity gained after recovering from a bout of covid-19 is more protective against the new delta variant than vaccine-induced immunity. Natural immunity was estimated to be about 13 times stronger than having two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Natural immunity should be key to how we deal with this.
Added to that are our own data that show that children do not tend to become seriously ill. To me that underlines the importance of the Government allowing parents to determine. In saying that, there must not be any pressure applied by schools, such as restricting after-school sports clubs without vaccination proof. A child needs a normal life. The hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge referred to the impact on children’s mental health. The figures for Northern Ireland show that the effect on mental health, even for children at primary school, is greater than ever. We need social interaction. That is why I am pleased to be back in Parliament and to have social interaction with people again, which is the way it should be. It is also important for children at school. The hon. Lady also referred to obesity, which it is important to put into perspective. The role of parents in physical health at school and home is critical.
Sometimes people go overboard on restrictions that are not always necessary. We need to be aware of how covid safety should be carried out while having a normal life and protecting children, yet making parental input central and critical. I will finish with this comment: I believe in the vaccine and am totally committed to what it has done. It has given us a leadership in the world through our vaccination programme, and I thank the Minister and the Government for their leadership.