Procurement of Evusheld Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department of Health and Social Care
Mike Penning
Main Page: Mike Penning (Conservative - Hemel Hempstead)Department Debates - View all Mike Penning's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(1 year, 6 months ago)
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Daisy Cooper
I thank the hon. Member for his intervention.
Let us move on to the facts. Is Evusheld safe and effective? Yes, it is. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency approved it in March, seven months ago. Is there enough scientific evidence? Yes, there is ample evidence.
Sir Mike Penning (Hemel Hempstead) (Con)
The hon. Lady and I have had conversations about this issue and about my own constituents. What I cannot understand is that the RAPID C-19 committee has looked at this 11 times. These are supposed to be experts that are looking at it. She is quite right to want evidence that proves that the committee is wrong. How come we have got into a situation where Government scientists are saying one thing and the rest of the scientific community is saying something completely different?
Daisy Cooper
I thank the right hon. Member for his intervention. That is exactly the question I would like the Minister to answer.
There are two significant problems with the most recent report published last week. First, it effectively says that the RAPID C-19 group looked at the results of a trial run on actual people in December 2021 and concluded that the evidence was so good that they were going to recommend that Evusheld be rolled out to patients. However, in May of this year, they looked at non-clinical data—test tubes, petri dishes and the like—and decided that the results were not good enough. It does not take a rocket scientist to work out that high concentrations of a virus in a petri dish do not translate to tests in real human beings.