Diolch yn fawr iawn, Deputy Llywydd, and thank you to everyone who took part in this debate this afternoon. Possibly what the Deputy Minister might have forgotten is that there's one more Welsh Conservative to speak to close the debate, so I will come on to responding to some of the points the Deputy Minister made later on in my winding-up speech.

So, next week will mark the two-year anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring the outbreak of a novel coronavirus in mainland China a public health emergency of international concern, and the anniversary of the Foreign Office advising against travel to the Wuhan province of China. Since that time, we have seen the biggest curtailment of freedoms and civil liberties ever witnessed in peacetime, all in an effort to prevent the spread of what we now know as COVID-19. While this was justified at the beginning, as we were waiting for treatments and vaccines to be developed in order to protect the most vulnerable, now, as we enter our third year of restrictions, and with over 90 per cent of the adult population vaccinated against COVID, can we continue to say that such curbs are necessary? Can we really justify draconian restrictions on our freedoms?

We know full well that measures such as those recently reinstated by the Welsh Government are doing harm, real harm, to the people of Wales. You would be hard pressed to find anyone who can honestly say that the past two years haven't impacted their mental well-being. How many children will never recover from the damage done to their education and development due to school closures? How many families have been forced into poverty because restrictions have forced businesses to cease trading? How many generations will be forced to live with the debts racked up to deal with the impact of lockdowns? We spent, and continue to spend, eye-watering amounts during the past two years in order to shut down large parts of our economy. Think how those billions could have been spent. We could have had a first-grade social care sector, for starters. We can't carry on doing this forever and the SARS-CoV-2 virus is not going away. We have to learn to live with it, and I may be the fourth or fifth to say that now from the Welsh Conservatives, so you might want to tick that one off as well on the Plaid Cymru benches.

We can protect the vulnerable by ensuring that they are fully vaccinated and have immediate access to COVID treatment should they get sick. But the rest of us have to get on with our lives. We can't go into lockdown every bad flu season. Yes, COVID is worse than the flu, but only to the unvaccinated and the most vulnerable. For everyone else, there isn't much difference. 

Recent lockdowns have not stopped the disease from spreading, so why does this Welsh Government immediately go for the nuclear option every time there is a new variant? Enough is enough, and it's time we learned to live with COVID. We need a road map to recovery and a—