Chamber and committees

Thank you.

It is important that we constantly revisit the messaging on the whole issue of Covid to ensure that it is achieving its purpose. I think that, in general, over the course of the pandemic, Government communications have been very effective and very focused in getting the message across. Particularly for younger people, we must ensure that good, strong evidence is available to them about the dangers to which they are exposed as a consequence of Covid. The committee has discussed and Parliament has extensively discussed long Covid, which could be a very serious factor in younger people’s lives.

The most important thing is that we have to ensure that we properly and fully address the issues and perspectives of young people in identifying how we can most effectively communicate such a message and ensure that young people are persuaded that they are as much at risk from Covid as other members of our society are. It is important that we do not have a message that suggests anything other than that young people face significant risks as a consequence of the virus.

Thank you.

Mr Fairlie’s latter point is an important one that gets to the heart of a point that I made in my opening statement. The Government has changed its approach to the handling of the pandemic. I said earlier that we are no longer seeking to suppress Covid to the lowest possible level and that, now that we have vaccinations, the restrictions required to suppress Covid could not be justified, given that they cause serious harms of their own. We are trying to operate within a context in which vaccination is available to us and, if we maximise the uptake of vaccinations, we will provide the greatest amount of protection against the prevalence of the virus.

The best way to explain that is to go back to the situation that we faced in January. In January, the Government got advice that basically said to us that, unless we applied a further, immediate lockdown, there would be a very serious risk—if not an inevitability—that our health service would be unable to meet its central purpose and commitment to members of the public. We had to follow that advice because such a low level of the population—a tiny proportion—had been vaccinated at that time, and even then, only one dose had been given.

Today, we find ourselves in a very different situation with a very successful vaccination programme for the over-40s and a vaccination programme for the under-40s that still has some way to go. We are trying to take steps, essentially, to enable us to maximise the protection that we can achieve from the vaccination programme. That is the strategy that the Government is pursuing. We are trying to utilise vaccination as the means of resisting the pressure that the virus can put on us and to avoid having to take any further restrictive measures.

We knew from the four harms analysis—on which the previous committee questioned me before the election in May, and which dominated our thinking and planning as we took steps to relax restrictions over the past 12 months or so—that we had to take steps that would adapt and change, given the presence of the vaccination programme in our society and its effectiveness. There has been a change in the way that the Government is handling such issues. It recognises that Covid causes multiple harms that we need to avoid. The best way to do that is by having very high participation rates in the vaccination programme and by following the baseline measures that I discussed earlier with Mr Rowley.

Mr Fairlie asked whether there are any plans to extend the need for certification beyond the very limited number of groupings that we have highlighted. The Government has no plans to do that.

I do not know whether Professor Leitch wants to add to anything that I have said.

The primary purpose of the policy proposal that the First Minister set out yesterday is to strengthen resistance to the virus by maximising compliance with the measures that we know will have the greatest impact in stemming the prevalence of serious illness as a consequence of people contracting it.

We face a very difficult situation just now. Members will be familiar with the fact that the number of cases has risen sharply in recent weeks, since the relaxation of restrictions on 9 August. Earlier in the summer, there was a very sharp rise and then a very sharp fall in the number of infections. At this stage, the Government is concerned that the rise in the number of infections needs to be tackled with measures to try to reduce its significance.

As the First Minister set out to Parliament yesterday, even if 2 to 3 per cent of individuals who test positive for Covid have to be admitted to hospital, 2 to 3 per cent of a very large number is a lot of people, and that equates to the levels of hospitalisation at previous stages in the pandemic, which we wish to avoid. We are trying to take steps within the measures that are available to us, without reintroducing restrictions, to maximise the capacity of the population to resist the spread of coronavirus. The purpose of the move is to maximise resistance within the population and reduce the danger that we will have to impose further restrictions in the future. It is clear that the Government is keen to ensure that that does not happen.

No, convener.

That very material point was raised with me yesterday by some of the sectoral representatives, who said that there can be a pretty fine line between different venues. We will discuss those issues with the relevant sectors.

As the First Minister made clear yesterday, we do not want the measure to be applied to the hospitality sector as a whole and we want to avoid any steps that might take us into that territory. As for the point of distinction that Mr Whittle has raised, it is important that we get this right in the judgments that we make.