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We know, by all the different measures, that many more people are dying now than were before the pandemic.
In particular, the impact on people’s hearts, and increasingly younger people’s hearts, deserves attention. The British Heart Foundation reported last June that since the start of the pandemic, 100,000 more people have died than would have been expected. That is surely significant cause for us to take this question seriously.
We know that there are adverse effects from the vaccination. Everybody acknowledges that; it is a question of the extent to which those effects have been manifested.
I am afraid, is that the MHRA is significantly deficient in the way it operates. The Cumberlege report-this was referenced in the earlier debate-raised concerns about the way treatments are regulated and licensed that have not yet been addressed.
I am afraid that through the covid episode many of the same concerns were manifested in relation to the vaccines.
We now know that the MHRA knew about the effect of the AstraZeneca vaccine on blood clotting as early as February 2021, but issued a warning about that only some months later-in April, a month after other countries had suspended the AZ vaccine. The MHRA also knew about the prevalence of heart problems and myocarditis in February 2021 but did nothing about it until June that year. In the intervening time, millions of people were vaccinated without the knowledge that the MHRA had. As has been said, we found out recently that Pfizer misrepresented the safety and efficacy of the vaccine. There has been very little comeback against it for that, and no meaningful fine. As we heard, just a few thousands pounds were charged in expenses.
The regulatory system that oversees the pharmaceutical companies is surely deeply conflicted, not least due to being partly funded by the pharmaceutical companies that it was set up to represent.
It is significant and of concern that they have made so much money out of the vaccines, and so far do not appear to be making due recompense for some of the acknowledged harms- I am not talking about the wilder claims-that their vaccines have been responsible for. Will the Minister enlighten us on whether the indemnities against civil and Government action that the Government awarded to the vaccine manufacturers at the beginning of the production process still apply if it transpires that the companies misled the Government and the public about the safety and efficacy of their product?
The inquiry has been mentioned. There are so many unanswered questions and apparent red flags that it surprises me that the media and Parliament are not more up in arms about excess deaths.
I am surprised that more attention is not being paid to this question.
The fact is that this scandal-if it is a scandal-suits no one in high places in our country.
It is true that we have an inquiry, but as the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton said, surely it is asking the wrong questions.
It is very concerning that the module looking at the vaccination programme has been postponed.
It strikes me that the inquiry is essentially asking the wrong questions; it is really just asking why we did not do more lockdowns quicker. That seems to be its prevailing question for the experts-not whether the whole response was the right one, and crucially, in the light of what we now know, whether the final response of a mass vaccination programme was as safe and effective as was claimed.
We are rightly proud in this country of the effectiveness, speed and operation of the vaccine production and roll-out. It was a triumph of effective collaboration between Government and the private sector. The operation of the roll-out was a victory that all people can acknowledge, but it is not enough to say that the roll-out was done well. Was it done safely? Did it need to be done on the scale on which it was done? Particularly, did young people need to be vaccinated at all? We all remember Kate Bingham and others saying early on that the vaccine was only for the older population. These questions are increasingly being asked by the public and raised in the media.
Let me conclude quickly with what I have been doing. I hope that we will get more answers from the Minister than I have had so far from the Government. On 17 April 2023-a year ago yesterday-I wrote privately to the Secretary of State, asking him for evidence that justified the Government’s assertion that there was no link between the vaccines and the excess deaths. I did that because I had so much correspondence from people raising that concern. I said: