Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 12:35 pm on 30 December 2020.
Thank you. I'll try to rush through as many of the 12 separate questions as I can, Presiding Officer. To start off with, Wales is not lagging behind other UK countries when it comes to the vaccination programme, and you'll see that when the official figures are published tomorrow. It's important that we compare like with like and don't get carried away by misleading press reports.
On over-80s in care homes, we are already vaccinating people over the age of 80 and in care homes. I do note with some regret that the utterly misleading and misrepresentative tweet from the leader of your party has never been corrected. On that, care home residents have never been left behind.
On JCVI advice, that remains in place. Their advice and the advice that we've received from the regulator about the use of the vaccine and its approval is that a gap of up to 12 weeks can be taken. All four chief medical officers across the United Kingdom have confirmed that a 12-week gap is appropriate, so people will still be getting their second shot but in 12 weeks' time. That actually means that we can cover more people with the immunity benefit that the first shot provides at a more rapid pace, because we won't need to hold back a second shot, in terms of the conditions that the regulators have placed on approval of not just the Oxford vaccine but the already approved Pfizer-BioNTech one.
Primary care contracts are in place for vaccination. That will, most obviously, cover community pharmacy and general practice. We've had very constructive conversations in planning for this with primary care contractors, and I'm very grateful to them.
Vaccine teams are expanding. That includes a very positive and continuing partnership with the military, which, as I've said on a number of occasions, has been very can-do throughout this. We have a good working relationship with military planners and we'll be taking up the offer of some military support to actually help with the vaccination roll-out as well.
Front-line health and social care workers are already in the current priority groups. We have about 360,000-odd people who are in the current two priority groups who are already receiving the vaccine. It's quite a large number to work through. They already include our front-line health workers, so they are already part of what we're doing and we are following the JCVI advice. We're not going to be interfering with that to suddenly deprioritise vulnerable members of the public. Providing the vaccine in large numbers rapidly will actually help us to reduce mortality within some of our most vulnerable citizens, and we'll certainly be doing that, as well as protecting our front-line staff.
On critical care capacity, as I said in my statement, which I know you had a copy of in advance, the capacity does vary from day to day because it is so reliant on staff. Staff are the limiting factor, with absence rates of over 10 per cent not being uncommon across our services—more so, I'm afraid, within the ambulance service. So, that is the biggest limiting factor that we have, and it's why I do find some genuine despair with some people hawking themselves around as statistics experts claiming that there is lots of free capacity available within our health service. There simply is not. Every choice we make to surge into more critical care capacity means other NHS activity is not going ahead, and we are very much limited by staff availability. That is also a real and significant factor for challenges facing colleagues in the social care sector.
On WAST and the army, I agreed and approved the approach for the army to assist, and that will be reviewed as opposed to having a hard stop within that. As I say, I'm very grateful for the way that the army and their other colleagues within the armed forces have been very much can-do in supporting the efforts not just of the ambulance service but more generally as well.
On press reports about a wish list, these were not required items. Basic items are provided by the health service. There is no failure in the basic provision of items that our staff rely upon. I think we actually should be very proud of what our NHS has done to equip our staff at very, very difficult times throughout this pandemic, and I hope that Members are not carried away with a silly-season story that actually, on examination by the health board, wasn't shown to be a plea for people to provide their own basic items that they should need.
On education's return, we still expect to return as planned, with a phased return to schools, together with the serial testing that we will be introducing. There will be further conversations between local government, the education Minister and relevant trade unions in the area to provide confidence for people who'll want to return to work, but also the confidence for parents and learners. And it's in all of our interests that children do return to school, because we recognise the real harm that could be done if children aren't in school. Home isn't always a safe place for every child, but we also know that there's a—[Inaudible.]—in terms of the mental health and well-being of children and young people. We also know this can have a real effect on their ability to get good qualifications at the end of this year as well. And, in the conversations I had yesterday with our scientific advisers and the chief medical officer, there is nothing available to us in the evidence that suggests that schools should not open even with the new variant in wider circulation, because the same control measures, if undertaken properly, should be effective.
Now, on the point about publishing the seeding map of the new variant, I expect that to be published in a future technical advisory group report. It will be published as soon as possible. I think it would be helpful, as I indicated to spokespeople when providing the briefing, that the information on this, I think, would help people to understand what's happening with the spread of the new variant across the country.
But going to your final question, there are only four labs in the UK, as I understand, who can test for the dropout—the change in the genetic sequence that allows us to understand if the new variant is likely to be present. Three of those are lighthouse labs that receive tests from Wales; the other is a lighthouse lab in Scotland. And that means that we are now sending more of our samples to get a more representative understanding of where the new variant has spread, to those three labs that we have access to, to then understand more clearly the extent to which the new variant is prevalent or whether it's becoming dominant, because, in England, they now believe that it is the dominant part of COVID. So, no longer a new variant, but what normal COVID is going to be, and that, in itself, has real concerns and real problems for all of us across the health and care sector right across the UK. Thank you, Llywydd.