Health and Social Care Update

Simon Fell Excerpts

Thursday 18th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

I am very happy to provide the hon. Lady with a briefing, because she should be very proud of her country. AstraZeneca is providing the Oxford vaccine free of charge—it is not charging for any intellectual property rights—right around the world. That is not true, as she implies, for all the vaccine companies, but she should be really, really proud of ours.

[Simon Fell (Barrow and Furness) (Con) [V]]

I was listening to the excellent “Covid Confidential” podcast on the BBC and was surprised and delighted to find out that when the various vaccines were nearing production they were named after submarines built in my constituency, so may I first thank my right hon. Friend for his choice of names? Secondly, not to labour this analogy, a good defence rests on having a good range of options, and Kate Bingham recently said that not having monoclonal antibodies as part of our defence is the gap in our armour, so can my right hon. Friend give an update on where his Department is on this?

[Matt Hancock]

Yes, this is an incredibly important subject and we are working very hard on it with clinical leads and external experts. I said earlier that success has many fathers, and I am sure that the people of Barrow are very proud of their role in making sure that we could keep what needed to be kept confidential confidential. We have now had to change all those names, because everybody knows about it.