Vaccine Misinformation

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:18 pm on 24 November 2020.

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Photo of Angela Burns Angela Burns Conservative 2:18, 24 November 2020

First Minister, I do agree with you that there have been improvements in vaccine uptake, but I'd also like to point out that, according to the most recent seasonal influenza Wales 2019-20 annual report, the uptake of the flu vaccine amongst NHS staff was only 56 per cent this year, and you'd think that NHS staff, more than almost anybody else, would surely really understand the value of a vaccine and what benefits we can all get from it. We've also got our very hard-to-reach people, the people who speak neither Welsh nor English, people who are new to our country, people in very, very marginalised areas, or people in very rural areas, where, again, that whole notion of coming out and getting vaccinated—. Plus the vaccine for COVID needs to be a two-vaccine stop, where you might have a situation where someone has one and just thinks, 'Oh well, that's it, I'm done', when in fact they need that second one to make sure that they are really taken care of. So I wonder what plans the Government will be putting together, either as Wales itself or as a UK entity, in trying to really get a strong message out that, actually, there is nothing to be fearful of.

And may I just very quickly also say that we must be very careful how we do that messaging? I speak as a parent whose first child had all the MMRs individually because Andrew Wakefield was at the height of his scare fest, and my second child had just the MMR, because just normal, ordinary people can take fright very easily when all the wrong messages go out. So, I think it's incredibly important that we put together a really cohesive and coherent communication policy, and I would be very interested to know what your Government is doing to put that together and, indeed, how all of us might be able to help to spread that message.