Chamber and committees

I have a quick question about social prescribing. In the previous session, the Health and Sport Committee produced a report on the benefits of social prescribing and said that it is an investment, not a cost. Social prescribing is good for physical and mental health. What needs to be done, or is being done, to demonstrate that social prescribing is really good? How will that work provide evidence that social prescribing could benefit from further investment?

My supplementary is similar to Sue Webber’s question about the “Hands, face, space” guidance. We have test and protect in Scotland, while England has had track and trace or test, trace and isolate. What collaborative work will be done on finding out whether TTI, test and protect or whatever worked, and on people’s understanding of and adherence to the guidance? It is important that what is contained in messaging is achievable in order to contain pandemics, so I am interested to hear whether there will be any collaboration on behavioural aspects with regard to such important messages.

Yes.

I congratulate Sarah Boyack on securing the debate. Ms Boyack has rightly outlined the issue of vaccine monopolies. I remind members that I am a nurse and I am part of NHS Dumfries and Galloway’s vaccine team. I have not done many booster shifts recently, but I have one scheduled on 30 December.

I support the calls from charities for the Prime Minister to waive intellectual property rules and to insist that vaccine technology is shared with the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 technology access pool.

As Action Aid points out, more than 200 million people have contracted Covid-19 infection during the pandemic, more than 4.5 million people have died and at least nine new billionaires have been minted because of Covid. That must change. Instead of creating vaccine billionaires, we must vaccinate the billions of people across the globe. Access to vaccines is not solely about ethics or fairness; it is also about reducing and limiting the reach and spread of a global and deadly virus.

Ensuring global access to Covid-19 vaccinations is in everyone’s interest. It will have many knock-on advantages for societies, economies, businesses and supply chains across the whole globe. At the end of September, the United Nations chief, António Guterres, spoke to world leaders on the disgraceful state of vaccine inequality, calling it

“a moral indictment of the state of our world. It is an obscenity.”

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, vaccines have been produced. Although the proportion of the population needed to safely achieve global immunity to Covid-19 is uncertain, the World Health Organization has highlighted that herd immunity against measles and polio required 80 to 95 per cent of the population to be vaccinated.

That means that to be more effective the use of vaccines will likely need to be more widespread, globally. However, vaccine availability currently differs vastly from country to country. Work by the Our World in Data project, associated with the University of Oxford, has shown the differences in availability of vaccines. Using data from Governments and health ministries around the world, the project provides daily updates on global vaccination levels.

On 23 August 2021, it reported that 32.5 per cent of the world population had received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine and 24.5 per cent had received two vaccine doses. However, only 1.4 per cent of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose. Many of those low-income countries could be considered part of the global south and 1.4 per cent is an incredibly low number.

In April 2020, a global initiative called COVAX was set up to ensure fair access to Covid-19 vaccines between countries, regardless of their income level. Jointly directed by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance and the World Health Organization, the initiative pools global funding to invest in research, manufacture, purchase, and distribution of vaccines.

However, most high-income countries, including the UK, have made direct deals with manufacturers. That has led to high-income countries dominating the purchasing and administration of vaccines. As a consequence, vast regions of the world experiencing a rapid rise in COVID cases and deaths are unable to access vaccines, which are our primary route out of the pandemic.

One figure that I quoted was that it costs $1.08 to produce a vaccine dose, but that vaccine is being sold to countries in the global south for $9.72 per dose. Does the member think that that should be addressed?

Thank you, Presiding Officer. I thank Stephen Kerr for that intervention. I am keen to ensure that we are aware that a lot of public funding from the UK went into the development of the vaccines. It is great that we have the vaccines, but, as Sarah Boyack pointed out, we are just going to go round and round with new variants, which I come on to in more detail.

Pfizer and Moderna are currently selling more than 90 per cent of their vaccines to rich countries, charging up to 24 times the potential cost of production, according to analysis by the People’s Vaccine Alliance. It costs around $1.08 to produce a vaccine dose, but they are being sold to countries in the global south for $9.72 each.

Last week, a former surgeon colleague of mine, Fanus Dreyer, who is the new president of the International Federation of Surgical Colleges, told me that the only way to reduce new variants and the transmission of the virus is to ensure that the world is vaccinated. That echoes exactly the words of António Guterres, who said:

“If the virus is allowed to spread like wildfire in the Global South … it will mutate again and again … This can prolong the pandemic significantly, enabling the virus to come back to plague the Global North.”

It benefits us if we do whatever we can to make the vaccine available globally. I again call on the Prime Minister to act in the interest of public health, address intellectual property law and ensure that vaccine technology and know-how are shared globally.

Will the First Minister join me in thanking every member of our national health service staff, every volunteer and every person has gone to have their booster jag for their stunning and braw efforts, who have allowed Scotland to become the first UK nation to give a booster or third dose of the Covid-19 vaccine to more than half its entire adult population?

While we are talking about access, I want to highlight the challenges for rural areas. The minister comes from a rural area in the north-east and he will be well aware of the challenges. I am also thinking of the north-west and the south of Scotland. When women from rural areas access care, are we monitoring that and tracking the care and pathways associated with it?

Regarding the workforce, and the provision of education, I know that there are online learning programmes, including the Royal College of General Practitioners perinatal mental health toolkit. As a vaccinator, I am still accessing the Turas learning models; I did a quick check of the perinatal mental health modules and there are seven specific modules, one of which is on stigma. How do we track those modules and the uptake? Who is taking up those modules? Is it midwives, psychologists or GPs? I think that they are fabulous modules. How do we encourage our healthcare professionals to take up the e-learning modules and how can we monitor that?

The minister mentioned stigma in his opening comments and took a question from Sandesh Gulhane about it, so I will not labour the matter. However, I know that the Government is doing a lot of work to address concerns and raise public awareness around perinatal mental health. One of the issues that is being addressed is concern that mothers might have their children taken away from them. There are 12 action items in the perinatal and infant mental health programme board delivery plan. Will the minister elaborate a wee bit on specific actions that are being taken to tackle stigma?