Llywydd, can I thank Rhianon Passmore and thank her for drawing attention to Scott Howell’s experience? It’s very important, I think, this afternoon that we do remember, of course, people who have died and the suffering and the grief of families, but those many people who did not lose their lives, but whose lives have been profoundly affected by the experience of coronavirus. It is a cruel illness. And those people who end up in intensive care, fighting for their lives, have been very much part of the thinking behind today. Those days back at the start of this pandemic when we worried that we might run out of beds, that we would run out of ventilators, that there wouldn't be intensive care available for people who needed it, and it is thanks to not just the commitment and hard work, but the sheer inventiveness of firms and of clinicians across Wales that created conditions in which we didn’t face those most worrying eventualities.

You would expect me to say, Llywydd, that the lesson I draw from this experience is of the power of practical socialism. When I see people going for vaccination, I think to myself, 'There you see a service that depends not at all on who you are or where you live or who you know or whether you can pay; the only thing it depends upon is the fact that your need comes first.' And we have provided vaccination to those people in order of their clinical vulnerability—each according to his need, each according to his ability. It is the ability of those people who turn up to carry out vaccination that provides that hope in the lives of those individuals. I see that sense of public service in everything that they do, and I see in the Welsh public's reaction to it that powerful sense of fairness—that if somebody needs it more than you, you are prepared to wait your turn. That's what I see in those queues of people waiting for vaccination. I think it lifts our spirits, because it tells us something fundamentally important about who we are and what we are as a nation.