Chamber and committees

I presume that Ireland is still the biggest market for pups being bred and pregnant bitches being produced. There is a reasonably good trade of working sheepdogs between Ireland and the UK. Do you have a view on whether sheepdogs should be transferable between Ireland and the UK?

Will you clarify what the UK-wide position is in relation to dog chipping? All my dogs have had to get chipped.

I came across one of those points. I had a dog that went to another farmer and they could not find the chip, even though the dog was chipped and I had all the paperwork. There were only four databases at that point. If the number is now up to 16, how can we tie down the ability to track dogs? I want to consider that, because it is essential to our ability to make progress on the issue.

I cannot remember who mentioned it but, earlier on, there was mention of the hard core that we will never reach. There will always be a hard core that we will never reach. To be honest, I think that we just have to accept that that is the case.

We have figures here for the demographic areas where we are. As we get to the stage when we know that the hard core will just not take a vaccine—and we have to accept that that is the case—at what point is there a tipping point, where we acknowledge that we have everybody who is going to take the vaccine and we are controlling the virus to the best measure that we can? I get the point that we cannot make a straight line, as in “That’s worked because of that.” I get the fact that there is a suite of measures, and there is a belt-and-braces approach.

At what point do we get to a tipping point, however? If we see that everybody who is going to take the vaccine has got it and that the infection is at a stabilised rate, do we then say that there is no real value in having the passport any more, because we have reached that tipping point? Is that a viable proposition to get to at a later stage?

This is the COVID-19 Recovery Committee, so I see this as a bit of an opportunity. Professor Sharpe just talked about the current building regulations. If someone is building a house now, they have to make sure that there is trickle ventilation in the windows, and it has to take into account the size of the room relative to the size of the window and so on. You are right about schools—I, too, have been in some where the windows cannot be opened. That was the case when I was at school a very long time ago, and some of those windows will still not have been opened since then.

There is an opportunity for us as a country to say that we have a problem, and that we know that it will help to transmit the virus in enclosed spaces. A very simple solution for some high-level windows—I am taking in what Dr Fitzgerald said about high-level ventilation—would simply be to put trickle vents into wood-framed windows in older Victorian-age schools. Would it be sufficient to allow there to be heat at the bottom and a trickle vent at the top? Would that create enough ventilation in those spaces?

Yes, please.

I go to back to something that we talked about with Professor Leitch last week. After that exchange, I was contacted by a constituent regarding natural, as opposed to vaccination, immunity. I do not know whether it is correct, but I have been sent reams of “evidence” that natural immunity is more effective than vaccine immunity because you have been exposed to the virus’s entire sequence of about 30,000 genes, whereas the vaccine is primarily focused on the spike element. Lots of people say that they want to have the same freedoms as everybody else because they have had Covid, but they do not want to have the vaccine. How do you answer the belief that natural immunity is as strong as the immunity from vaccination?

Okay, but that leaves a question for the Government. If that person knows that they have had Covid and the timing of it, because they had a positive test, are their rights being impinged if they say that they do not want to have the vaccine because they know from the positive test result that they have a certain amount of immunity? Why should that person not be given the freedom to say that having had the disease is their “vaccine”?

Best of luck with that, then, lads.

Unfortunately, being the sixth person to ask questions, a lot of my stuff has already been brought through, although there are some details that are missing for me, so you will get a wee stream of consciousness here.

First, it has twice been mentioned this morning that the Welsh system requires a passport or a test. Am I not right in thinking that it is both? People still need the passport to get into venues in Wales, and the number of places is being increased. Is it not both there, as opposed to one or the other?

I absolutely take that point on board. As I say, I am merely passing on the views of my constituent. On compulsory vaccination for care home workers, which the committee has spoken about before, a company in my constituency has made that a stipulation and I totally agree with that because, like you, I speak to people who have lost loved ones to Covid.

I want to move on very quickly to an issue that has been raised previously: long Covid. I know that we are still battling with the pandemic, but, from what I am hearing from others, long Covid has the potential to create long-term damage long after we come out of the current period. A group called Long Covid Kids has been set up by the parents of children as young as two or three years old who have had Covid and now have severe problems. I am not asking a question—I am merely urging the Government to look seriously at what is happening with kids with Covid.