Nadhim Zahawi – Government ‘absolutely’ threw protective ring around care homes
Dominic Cummings’ much anticipated testimony before the lessons learnt joint inquiry on Wednesday has proved as volcanic. Earning his particular ire was the health secretary Matt Hancock. Cummings claimed that Hancock should have been fired for ’15 to 20’ different reasons, and alleged that Hancock had lied about supplying tests for Covid patients before they were discharged to care homes during a cabinet meeting in March 2020. Matt Hancock stated two months later that the government had thrown a ‘protective ring’ around the care home sector. Andrew Marr challenged the Vaccines Deployment minister Nadhim Zahawi to provide evidence for this claim, given that care homes are thought to have seen as many as 42,000 deaths due to Covid since the pandemic began:
AM: Do you think, now, that the government threw a ‘protective ring’ around the care homes?
NZ: I think absolutely … It’s easy with the benefit of hindsight to learn the lessons… [Our] capacity at the time [was] constrained by [our] diagnostics industry… We placed the residents of care homes at the top of the list of Phase 1 of the vaccination programme. They were No. 1 to get that protection.
‘It is right’ to look at compulsory vaccines for NHS staff
Zahawi told Marr that the government was considering making Covid vaccinations mandatory for NHS staff as part of a duty of care towards their patients:
NZ: It would be irresponsible of us as a government… not to ask that question, not to think about it and consider it… There is a precedent for this – surgeons have to be vaccinated against hepatitis B, because there is a responsibility to protect those that are most vulnerable, so it is right to look at that.
Government will ‘absolutely’ follow JCVI recommendation on vaccines for children
Zahawi also suggested that it was possible that the UK could follow in the footsteps of the USA and Canada in providing vaccines for older children. He said that the matter was under consideration by the Joint Committee on Vaccines and Immunisation, and that their decision either would likely be implemented:
NZ: We’ve seen the US regulator and the Canadian regular approve the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for 12 to 15 year olds… The JCVI will look at this… I will absolutely follow their recommendation.
Don’t ‘extrapolate anything’ from PM’s secret wedding
Trevor Phillips also spoke to Zahawi and asked him about what the Prime Minister’s very quiet wedding to Carrie Symonds meant for the opening up of the rest of the country. The couple were wed yesterday afternoon at a secretly planned ceremony in Westminster Cathedral:
TP: Was the Prime Minister and Carrie Symonds’ decision to [get married] yesterday a hint that… June 21st is not going to be what we hoped it was going to be?
NZ: No, I wouldn’t extrapolate anything from that. On June 14th, we will set out very clearly the data that we are continuing to gather… and we will share that with the nation.
Mike Padgham – I don’t believe we had a ‘protective ring’
Phillips went on to interview Mike Padgham, the chair of the Yorkshire based Independent Care Group. Padgham did not agree with Zahawi’s assertions about the ‘protective ring’ around care homes:
MP: I can only give is as I see it… I don’t believe myself that there was a ring of protection thrown round us. In those early days, it was difficult. We were forgotten… We weren’t ready. We didn’t have the PPE, we didn’t have the testing. And it took the government many many weeks to actually see what was happening in homes.
Edwin Poots – EU is ‘doing demonstrable harm’ to Northern Ireland
Marr interviewed Edwin Poots, the newly elected leader of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party. A key part of Poots’ campaign has been his opposition to the Northern Ireland Protocol, the section of the Brexit withdrawal agreement regulating the border and customs arrangements with Great Britain and the EU. Poots has reportedly declared the current provisions of the Protocol to be ‘intolerable’, pointing to economic disruption caused by the volume of checks having to be conducted from goods from Britain, and argued that it was damaging the peace process:
EP: We have violence on our streets in Northern Ireland. That hasn’t been the case for years, and that’s on the back of this Protocol… The current batch of Commissioners don’t seem to care for the peace process in Northern Ireland and… that attitude needs to change. They are doing demonstrable harm to every individual in Northern Ireland, and it’s having a devastating impact.
Maroš Šefčovič – Unilateral action would ‘sour our relationship’
Marr spoke to Maroš Šefčovič, a vice president of the European Commission, alongside Poots, asking him what the EU’s reaction would be if Boris Johnson decided to fundamentally alter the provisions of the Protocol by triggering Article 16. Article 16 was famously nearly triggered by the EU during the vaccines dispute in January of this year:
AM: If that happened… would you start to build a hard border on the island of Ireland?
MS: I think that our commitment to the… Belfast Agreement is absolute. The key pre-requisite for that is the avoidance of a hard border… I think that what we need… is more cooperation, a joint approach and not unilateral actions, because it would further sour our relationship… We need to calm down… and focus on the future.
Linda Bauld – 21st June for unlocking is ‘very ambitious’
Phillips spoke to Professor Linda Bauld, a professor of Public Health at the University of Edinburgh. Bauld was not optimistic about the government’s unlocking date:
LB: I think it’s very ambitious… In some parts of the country… including parts of Scotland, we’ve seen a big increase… So looking ahead, the 21st of June is very soon. To avoid more preventable deaths… we really need to be cautious at the current time.
Carl Bildt – ‘It ain’t over’
And finally, the former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt, who is now the World Health Organisation’s special envoy for the ACT Accelerator, spoke to Times Radio’s Tom Newton-Dunn and Isabel Hardman about the future of the pandemic:
CB: I see that as a substantial risk, that in Europe and in North America, people think this is over, and it ain’t over. Because first of all we are affected by the global economy taking a substantial hit… and then the different… mutations… If this goes on… [they may be] significantly more contagious, and perhaps at some point in time, more dangerous.
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