COVID-19 Vaccination Programme

Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 2:14 pm on 4 November 2020.

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Photo of Vaughan Gething Vaughan Gething Labour 2:14, 4 November 2020

Thank you. I think it's really important to remind ourselves that a vaccine won't be a magic bullet in itself. It is really important to reflect that the efficacy and impact of a vaccine in its first stage of delivery is not something that we will fully understand until it's given on a wider population basis. That's why the safety trials for a vaccine before being introduced are so important, and many vaccines that look promising, once they get to the final stage, don't ultimately go forward into population use. So, it is generally encouraging. There are lots of vaccines that are in trials that are promising, but we should not expect all of them to be delivered and to be successful. We should not expect all of them to be delivered and successful in the very, very near future. But, when one does become available, the Member, I think, can take comfort in the fact that we are already planning about how to deliver that, about which groups of staff would deliver that, how we would do that in different venues, different professional groups working together. And that then comes back to the point about what we choose to do, because a vaccine is unlikely to be delivered that will provide a lifetime's worth of protection. We have a seasonal flu vaccine that people are asked to undertake every year. We may have something that is of that effect, or even it may be something that has a lesser time frame in terms of its impact. We'll need to understand all of that as we're going through the delivery of any vaccination programme. 

So, the essential messages about our behaviour and about the choices we make will still be different to the way we lived our lives before the pandemic for some time to come. Coronavirus is still going to be with us for a significant period of time, even with a first-stage successful vaccine. So, again, the choices in what each of us should do will be really important, not just for now and the next few months, but for a longer period of time as well.