Good afternoon and welcome to my regular patient safety update. The new Omicron variant is the main story this week, but under cover of many other stories the government today quietly put out its social care white paper so I look at that as well as vaccines, the cancer treatment backlog and suicide prevention. 

SPIKING OUR HOLIDAYS? Dominating the news since the weekend, the new Omicron variant is raising many concerns and questions in Westminster and beyond. There are some critical ‘known unknowns’ with Omicron– including its transmissibility, vaccine evasion and whether it causes more serious disease. We are basically in limbo for another 10 days until scientists complete their analysis but there are quite a few clues suggesting ministers are worried: firstly the lightning speed at which the red list was re-activated over the weekend; secondly the rapid rule change on masks and thirdly the undoubtedly huge effort going into vaccine boosters – all of which suggest ministers are not expecting this to be a false alarm. Insiders tell me the thing that has most spooked government scientists is this warning from the boss of Moderna who is respected for being pretty sensible and measured. More encouragingly though the WHO today said early evidence suggested Omicron symptoms are mild and the vaccines work and Israel says the Pfizer vaccine still works – so we are just going to have to bite our fingernails for a few more days. Will we learn the bigger lesson about the need to get the whole world jabbed, as Gordon Brown and others have been saying? I have my doubts even though the health secretary agreed with me on this in parliament. 

LESSONS LEARNED In the meantime the government has clearly learned the importance of buying time after what went wrong last year by massively accelerating the booster programme including offering them to all adults. But why are the regulators, having been so nimble earlier this year, dragging their feet? France approved two jabs for teenagers before the summer, but it took the intervention of the CMOs to get even one jab approved in September – whilst the US and EU are now about to approve them for over 5s. A pandemic is the one time when you need regulators to reassure the public rapidly about the safety of vaccines but we seem to be in constant catch-up mode. 

VACCINES ARE SAFE – PROVED! Pregnant women have been urged to get the COVID-19 vaccine following the publication of new data by the UK Health Security Agency which shows no consistent differences between vaccinated women and all women in the numbers of stillbirths, low baby birthweights, and premature births. 98% of pregnant women in hospital with symptomatic coronavirus are unvaccinated. Pfizer only began its clinical trials with pregnant women in February so we could have done with this research earlier.

SOCIAL CARE Today the government sneaked out its social care white paper so quietly it was not even mentioned in Today programme bulletins. It is, I am afraid, a disappointment: yes it’s progress to have a cap (although a less progressive one than many of us had hoped) but the additional funding of around £2bn a year is far, far less than the £7 bn uplift the Select Committee calculated (on Health Foundation figures) was necessary. Our number was not plucked out of the air: it was based on demographic change, increases in the national living wage and the original Dilnot proposals. The result is that hospitals will continue to be full of patients who cannot be discharged, making the winter crisis worse, and older people who should be helped to live independently at home will end up in A&E. I described it as three steps forward two steps back in my question to Social Care Minister Gillian Keegan today.

MISSED CANCER CASES One of the biggest lessons for future pandemics will be to maintain ‘clean’ or ‘green’ capacity in the NHS so that critical other services can continue. This is strongly backed up today by a concerning new study by the National Audit Office that found that up to 740,000 potential cancer cases that should have been urgently referred by GPs have been missed since the start of the pandemic and that 60,000 fewer people started treatment for cancer than would have been expected. We will no doubt return to this in our inquiry into cancer services. 

SUICIDE PREVENTION The government has announced a £5 million fund to support charities working on suicide prevention, focussing support on high-risk groups such as children and young people. The pandemic has had a huge impact on mental health so let me give a plug for a brilliant charity I met last night called The Listening Place run by an amazing lady called Sarah Anderson which is literally saving lives by offering regular counselling to serious suicide risks referred by the NHS.

COVID STATS LATEST It feels like calm before the Omicron storm at the moment as the data is relatively unchanged from last week. Around 862,000 people in England had COVID-19, which is around 1 in 65 people, slightly higher than the week before. Cases have only risen by just 1% in the last 7 days, and 5,346 patients were admitted to hospital in the last week, a 7% decrease from the week before. But a week is a long time in politics in a pandemic…

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Jeremy Hunt