- 3 hours ago
Catch up with all the latest politics news across the county, with Rob Bailey.
On this episode we discussed the meningitis outbreak in Canterbury, with Canterbury City Council leader Alan Baldock representing Labour, and Dr Julian Spinks.
On this episode we discussed the meningitis outbreak in Canterbury, with Canterbury City Council leader Alan Baldock representing Labour, and Dr Julian Spinks.
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TVTranscript
00:22Welcome to the Kent Politics Show on KMTV. I'm Rob Bailey and our focus is the meningitis
00:28B outbreak which put Kent at the centre of a national health scare this week. Two young
00:32people have died and more are seriously ill after coming into contact with the infection in
00:36Canterbury. And six years after the first Covid lockdown there have been haunting images of
00:41Kent students queuing for vaccines in face masks. But the outbreak raises serious questions about
00:47why only babies born after 2015 have been given the vaccine until now and did authorities act
00:53quickly enough to stop this outbreak from spreading. Health Secretary Wes Streeting visited Canterbury
00:58yesterday and reporter Chloe Brewster was there. The Health Secretary Wes Streeting has been at the
01:04University of Kent Canterbury campus today as hundreds of worried students received a vaccine
01:09to protect them against the meningitis outbreak that's currently ripping through our county.
01:14The visit coincided with the announcement that the jab is being offered to more people.
01:18All staff and students at the University of Kent, regardless of age, can now get the vaccine.
01:23Canterbury Christchurch students and pupils at a few select secondary schools will have it too.
01:28It's unclear if staff at these organisations will have the opportunity to have the vaccine,
01:32like their Uni of Kent counterparts. Anyone who's been to Club Chemistry since 5th March can also have it.
01:39If you went clubbing there, you're being urged to come forward. There are still a lot of unanswered
01:43questions about the rollout, but KMTV and Kent Online couldn't ask the minister as local press
01:48was shut out from his visit, with only national media allowed in the building. However, he did have
01:53a few seconds on his way out and he said this. Yeah, I think we've seen a really, really brilliant
01:59response here. The way in which the NHS team has mobilised so quickly, they've done a great job. We're
02:04expanding the availability of the vaccine today too, so we should expect to see more people coming
02:09through. We've got effective treatment through the antibiotics and effective vaccination campaign.
02:14The risk here in Canterbury remains low and across the country, extremely low. So I hope people can
02:20take confidence and reassurance from that. The widening of the vaccine rollout begs the question,
02:25has an entire generation been let down by the government? While men be vaccines began being
02:30offered to babies from 2015, teenagers off to university were never offered it, despite young
02:36adults being an at-risk group. That's why 40 MPs, including Canterbury's Rosie Duffield, are urging
02:42a catch-up vaccination programme for students. As a parent here in Canterbury myself, I know that
02:47Year 13s are often at those clubs and mixed together, sometimes in the same groups as the uni students.
02:53I think it is important to educate Year 13s, Year 12s even, coming up to that age, and to vaccinate
02:59Year 13s if we can possibly do that and roll it out. It is odd that we have that weird
03:03cut-off date,
03:04so I'm not sure why, because it's not as if this has gone away. So I think we need to
03:09look at that
03:09very seriously. We need to look at the education of younger people. This is a fact of life, this
03:15disease is out there. We do need to equip young people to just have a normal life, especially
03:20people who have suffered from the lockdown and the sort of horrible impact that had on your social
03:25lives. So yeah, I'd like that to just be seen as a normal thing, that you get vaccinated and
03:30therefore you're a lot safer. The open letter by MPs read that no family should have to discover
03:35too late that protection was available, but not available to many on our NHS. The vaccine cost
03:42several hundred to buy on a pharmacy and is now sold out in several areas in Kent. As for the
03:47numbers,
03:481,500 have been vaccinated so far and the total of confirmed and suspected cases on day five now
03:54is at 27. But by tomorrow morning, what will that number stand at and will the Health Secretary have
04:00any clear answers about when this crisis will pass? Well we hope he'll have the time to tell us if
04:05he
04:06ever returns to the county. Chloe Brewster for KMTV in Canterbury. And here with me is Canterbury City
04:13Council leader Alan Baldock of Labour and KMTV's resident GP Julian Spinks. Thank you so much
04:18for joining us. It is impossible to see this happening and not think back five or six years
04:24to the Covid outbreak and the kind of questions that we've been asking ever since the pandemic
04:30about the measures that were taken to protect people. It's just an automatic response now,
04:34isn't it? The cases were first known to health authorities actually before the weekend. I think
04:41it was Friday last week that they first knew. Mother's Day was coming up on the Sunday.
04:46Do you think that not letting people know about this until Sunday, until students had been
04:51travelling around to their families might have contributed to why this has been described as
04:56an explosive outbreak? I think it's come up with the idea that it's explosive and it was unusual and
05:03I think they were caught slightly on the hop because it was so unusual. Over my career and it's fairly
05:08long,
05:09all the cases I've seen have been individual cases and so most of the gameplay they do when they
05:15find this is based on small outbreaks, one or two cases, not more than that. To suddenly have a larger
05:22number, I think they had to sit down and think. Having said that, I think it might have been
05:27possible to actually alert people maybe even a day earlier and even when we came into work on Monday
05:33morning, really I had very little information. I had very much what I got from the press rather than
05:39having an official notification. Obviously, Alan, you're the leader of the District Council there.
05:45This is all happening within your patch. Do you think the health authorities and the university
05:50and all of the other organisations involved in the response have managed this well?
05:55I think now I'm not going to reflect too strongly on that. We have struggled to get the information out.
06:01I mean, part of our job as the District Council is literally to provide whatever the health authorities
06:06want. We can help. If we can make things happen, make things happen well, to allow them to deliver
06:11the service that people have to have and will expect to have. That's our job to do that. But
06:20we do that. We need information. We need the asks and requests. And also, we have got the opportunity
06:24to push out on our channels as much information as we can as well. And yeah, true. Initially, we struggled
06:30a lot with getting clear messages that we could put out, much as you did. And so, yeah, we're caught
06:36in that same place. So, yeah, clearer, earlier, better would have been good. We could have done
06:43some stuff with that as well. One of the big questions that's been coming out of this is about
06:47vaccinations. Obviously, there's a big catch-up operation now, isn't there, trying to catch people
06:51who obviously aren't vaccinated against this specific strain, meningitis B. And they're saying
06:59that they want to vaccinate 5,000 or more now as they continue to kind of widen the number of
07:05people
07:05who are eligible. Would it have been easier 10 years ago for a vaccination process to be in place,
07:12not just for babies? And why was it only babies that were given this vaccine to be given? Do you
07:18know,
07:18would you? Yes, because I'm sad enough to have looked at the Joint Committee on Vaccinations
07:23and Immunisation's discussion and recommendations. And this was, they were discussing it in 2014,
07:29a year before it was introduced. And they said there was absolutely, totally clear case,
07:35almost didn't matter how much the vaccine costs, for example, for babies. They were the highest risk
07:41group. And basically, the older you get, the lower the risk comes. But the risk does carry on into
07:48teenage and young adulthood. They looked at it. And the reason they didn't recommend it is that
07:53there was not as much research in that group. So they couldn't tell how well it would work.
07:58And in particular, they didn't know how long the vaccine would actually last for. Because,
08:02for example, a vaccine that gets children out of the first five years, and then isn't so effective,
08:08actually still doing a lot of good. Whereas if you give it to, say, a 12 year old,
08:12and it's gone by the time they go to university, then you're no better off. I'm not certain we know
08:16much
08:16more about it yet. But clearly, it's left this difficult situation between the sort of 12 to
08:2225 year olds, who really could have benefited from having the vaccine, but haven't.
08:28Alan, obviously, this is not your area. But where you might have a role in this is,
08:34as we heard in the package just then, that vaccine availability has been a bit of a challenge.
08:39Have you been trying to kind of work with GPs and these kind of clinics that are spring
08:45up to make sure there is vaccine available? We don't have that opportunity to influence
08:50the supply, but we can certainly influence to make sure that the places are there for
08:54people to set up vaccine clinics. We talked earlier, didn't we, about the necessity of,
08:58you know, their hard work to fit out. And we've done that in COVID times.
09:03We would do whatever we need to do to make it happen now, if that's what people wanted,
09:08and that's what the health services wanted. As it stands right now, the people that are eligible
09:12for a vaccine are those who either are students or a staff at the University of Kent, people who
09:17went to club chemistry between March 5th, March 15th. It's quite a narrow group in some senses.
09:24There'll be a lot of people in Canterbury who just live and work there, who go to schools there,
09:28who might think, well, why aren't we being protected? Are you concerned that it isn't wide enough yet?
09:33I think there's a knee-jerk reaction saying, why don't we just vaccinate everybody? But as you were
09:41saying, it is a high-risk group of people of sort of the late teenage years and into their 20s,
09:48the
09:48highest risk at that point of view. It's not a disease which is easily transmitted. So we have to
09:58prioritise what we're doing, I think, and we have to listen and work out a plan. And I'm sort of,
10:05you know, it's an easy answer to say the populist thing, isn't it? But it's another thing altogether
10:10to actually do it and do it well, because there's no point in doing it badly that just puts people's
10:17confidence level too high, maybe, or whatever. So it's an interesting thought. From your point of view,
10:23Julian, do you expect or do you think it would be a good idea for it to be an even
10:26wider vaccination
10:27programme? It would be good if it could. There are practical problems. And people who've gone to
10:32their GP practices and been told they can't have it, one of the reasons is childhood vaccines,
10:36and of course this is known as a childhood vaccine, are delivered to us in amounts that are based on
10:42the number of children who are going to need it. So we don't have big reserves. We might have one
10:46or two,
10:46but that's it. And who do you give it to? And likewise, really, on a broader basis, the national
10:51ordering of that vaccine is based on who they're going to give it to, plus some reserves. So if you
10:57suddenly
10:57said, right, we're going to do the entire country, that would be practically very difficult. But there
11:01just isn't the vaccine there, which is why to very broaden things out so that lots and lots of people
11:07are going to be getting it, there has to be a national decision and there will be a run in
11:10time
11:11to be able to achieve it. How long do you think that takes? You're talking minimum months, really.
11:16And I think we mustn't panic too much. Although this is a really nasty disease and this is a terrible
11:22outbreak we've had, from a national point of view, that it's still a relatively rare disease and your
11:29chances of catching it is still pretty rare. You have to be a close contact, generally over a period
11:35of time. Okay, well that's all we have time for for the moment. When we come back, we'll have more
11:38on the meningitis outbreak and its impact on students and teenagers in Kent. Stay with us.
15:05Welcome back to the Kent Politics Show on KMTV.
15:08Now, Kent has been at the centre of a national health scare this week. The outbreak of meningitis
15:13B brought back uncomfortable memories of the COVID pandemic for students and teenagers in East Kent.
15:18Not only because the thousands of them were curing in-face masks for treatment and vaccines,
15:23but also because it came with warnings about social mixing. In-person exams were cancelled and
15:28Canterbury student bars went quiet amid warnings about kissing, dancing, vaping and sharing drinks.
15:35KMTV spoke to students throughout the week. Here's what they told us.
15:39When you were told about the vaccines, was it something you were happy about or not?
15:45Yes, but yeah, I hate needles. But yeah, it's got to be dumb. It's for a better cause.
15:51So yeah, I think it's good. They've done it moderately quickly as well, I think.
15:55We only got the antibiotics earlier as well. So yeah, obviously get it out of the way.
16:01Yeah, it'll be nice and quick, ready for the last bit of term.
16:05We were all waiting for official statements to be made by the university. And I don't know,
16:10I feel like we had to make a lot of decisions ourselves before anything was really said by the
16:14uni. So I think in that regard, it could have been done better.
16:17When did you find out that you were going to get a vaccination today?
16:20I found out 2pm today, I think. I checked my emails and I saw that they were giving out
16:27vaccines in the hall. So yeah, I'm quite happy about that.
16:31Do you feel safe on campus at the moment? With this vaccine? Yeah, I do. Vaccine, antibiotics,
16:37I feel much safer. It went really well. The nurse was very helpful and very kind,
16:41talked you through everything, answered all of my questions. It was very useful.
16:45How long was the process? Did you arrive quite early? How long were you sort of queuing for?
16:50Well, I arrived at about half past two, so about an hour total. Not too long, but the queue was
16:59a bit long.
17:00Well, still with me is Canterbury City Council leader, Alan Baldock, and KMTV's resident GP,
17:06Julian Spinks. Julian, we're seeing that it really is reminiscent of COVID, but obviously it is very
17:11different to COVID. And what do we know? People are saying that meningitis has never really spread
17:16like this before. 27 cases at the point where we're filming this all linked effectively to one
17:23venue in Canterbury, as far as we know. How does it transmit and why are we seeing that kind of
17:30that kind of number? Well, it's definitely close contact. It's generally contact with things like
17:35saliva. So if you go into somebody's face, potentially that could do it, or if you sneeze
17:39into them. The talk about sharing things, obviously if you share a drink, you may actually be picking
17:43up saliva from there. And it's because the population has this in their throats. 10% of the general
17:51population and a quarter of young people have this. And it's completely harmless in their throats.
17:56It's not actually causing disease. What we don't fully understand is why sometimes it moves into
18:02a form which can get into the bloodstream, or can be transmitted. The outbreak here is very
18:09unusual for the sheer numbers. There seems to be like a super spreader event where it passed on to
18:14a lot of people. We don't fully understand why that's the case. But it's unusual. And so for the
18:20general population, the risk of catching it is relatively low, other than within close families,
18:26or in halls of residence when you share a kitchen, or between boyfriends, girlfriends, and so on.
18:32And of course, here we're talking about students at a nightclub. So we're talking about people who
18:36will have been sharing vapes, sharing drinks, kissing each other. And in the immediate aftermath
18:41of this, in the short term at least, that kind of activity is being discouraged. That people are not
18:46going to nightclubs and they're being told, well, you've got to think twice about whether you need
18:50to be kissing somebody this weekend. How long does that go on for? I mean, are these people going
18:54to once again have their normal teenage lives disrupted? I suspect it's not going to be long
19:00term. Quite how long it is in the short term is difficult to say. I think everyone's got an
19:05abundance of caution. So they're trying to avoid repeating the process happening again,
19:10because if there is a shift, and one of the things is why is this outbreak the way it is?
19:15Is it something that the actual bacteria has changed behaviour? Or is it down to changes in
19:21behaviour? You know, a few years ago, the idea of sharing vapes, well, there weren't vapes.
19:25So that sort of thing has changed. And we need to have a sort of inquiry into things, not to
19:31point
19:31fingers at people, but to actually work out whether we need to shift advice long term.
19:37Obviously, the other side of that, as well as there being an impact on young people who probably feel
19:41under siege from various medical restrictions that they've had over the last decade,
19:46is the impact on Canterbury itself. We've got a nightclub here that has been closed down
19:51temporarily. But we've also seen a wider impact across Canterbury, of that nightlife kind of
19:58just fading away a bit at a time where it's the end of term for students. It would normally be
20:02quite
20:02a busy week, wouldn't it? What have you noticed about that?
20:05Absolutely right. I mean, students are very much part of our life in Canterbury. And that's wonderful.
20:13But it's also our visitors, our pilgrims now, and all of it is just so important to us. I mean,
20:19we've been welcoming people to Canterbury for 900 years, and we're going to hope to carry on doing
20:23that for very much longer. But it's that general sense of, or lack of confidence again. I felt we were
20:30beginning to rebuild the confidence after the Covid years. The pubs are full, you know, several nights
20:37a week. Slowly but surely, you know, restaurants were getting more booked out, pubs are getting more
20:45people visiting. It's still hard, it was still tough for the traders in Canterbury. You know,
20:53footfall is down a little bit. But it's not doom and gloom. You know, I think we were very confident
21:01that we were coming out of this and, you know, things are good. And we've got lots of many shops
21:07in Canterbury, very few voids. All those things were looking so good. And this is another knock
21:12to that confidence. How big is the economic hit from this, do you think? We don't know yet, but already
21:17we do know there's less footfall. We do know that obviously the pubs and the clubs have got a hit
21:22as well. And they've already finding it really tough. So yeah, I mean, we will reflect back on
21:30this over the weeks to come and see whether it kicks straight back in with the summer coming along,
21:34or whether it is some sort of long-term effect that we have to work our way through again
21:38to build confidence over time. And what we know from Covid was that businesses needed special financial
21:43support to cope with the periods where either they couldn't trade or where confidence was so low
21:48the trading was very tough. Do you think we might find ourselves in a situation specifically in
21:52Canterbury where that might be an issue? I don't see that, actually. I think we have good,
21:59pretty good relations. They have pretty good opportunity. But it doesn't matter what you do,
22:06if people don't want to come into City or come in to spend their money or whatever,
22:10it doesn't matter what you do to manipulate that. It's in their head that they're able to
22:14do it in the first place. So there is that view. But when people feel the change to come out
22:21more
22:21and to get out more, we need to support that, you know. So it's always working to the longer term,
22:31and it's always just doing what you can all of the time, every single day of the week.
22:35Julian, people might look at Canterbury, and particularly at universities,
22:38it's very much a hub. People are travelling out and in all of the time. Canterbury is a big tourist
22:43destination. We've already talked a bit about how this transmits. But do you think, I mean,
22:48is it quite surprising we haven't seen more cases outside of East Kent, given that we're talking about
22:55quite a big diaspora of kind of area that people will be travelling around? I think you're looking
23:00at the catchment area of the nightclub, to be honest with you, because that seems to be
23:03the main source of all the infections at the moment. There is a catch-up regime for
23:09actually giving antibiotics and vaccinations to students who cut and run, said, I'm out of here,
23:15and went home. And in fact, they've just changed the GP contract to make it part of our core contract
23:22to give those catch-up vaccines to people who can't get to a local centre. So, you know,
23:27we are taking steps over that. But I think it's too early to say that there's going to be a
23:32risk
23:32of something national. But that doesn't make it any easier for Kent. The other thing I think
23:36that's reassuring for places like Canterbury is, if you look at COVID, actually people slowly relaxed.
23:42They worried at the first, and people didn't necessarily need to be locked down
23:46as much as they did. But over time, they start to go back.
23:50Alan, we saw Wes Streeting was in Canterbury. One of the things that was quite striking about
23:57that was that he would only talk to the national press actually inside the university campus. The
24:02local press was left outside. Does that disappoint you a little bit, given that this is such a locally
24:10focused incident, that the people who need the information most are the people here in Canterbury
24:15who will be looking to their local media for information. Was that a mistake?
24:22I, it's difficult to say. I mean, the information is published, it's out. And at that point of time,
24:27it was much, much clearer. So I think we had that information. We struggled for it earlier,
24:32as I said in the front part of the programme. But I don't know, I think possibly it was more
24:38to make
24:39a powerful message that didn't want to be confused by too much nuance, I think.
24:44So probably better to keep it focused. And it was literally the MP and that. I mean,
24:50I wasn't invited and I'm sure I didn't expect to be invited.
24:55A little bit of Westminster snobbery, maybe?
24:57No, not at all. I mean, we've got the big stories and the little stories and we're part of the
25:02little
25:02story, but we're in port cog in a wheel. So you just get on with it and just make life
25:11happen.
25:11Because it's our people in our city, in our shops, our businesses. And just the way we feel
25:16as a welcoming place is what I worry about. Yeah.
25:20So Julian, just as we kind of come towards the end of the show, we've got another weekend coming up.
25:24We know that the vaccination programme is in full swing, but the initial target was 5,000 people.
25:29As of Thursday night, it was 1,600 had had it. They're still giving antibiotics out. And it's
25:36a weekend when an awful lot of students in Canterbury will now be headed home all over the place.
25:40Is there another little risk this weekend of potential transmission? Is that end of term
25:47kind of thing a risk in itself? I think if there's lots of parties, there is a slightly
25:51increased risk. It's not enormous. And I think we have to remember that actually the antibiotics
25:56in the short term are more important than the vaccine. Antibiotics protect you within a few hours.
26:01The vaccine takes up to four weeks to get to full strength. So actually, a short delay in getting
26:06that vaccine isn't going to be as critical as delay or not getting the antibiotics if you're in the
26:13at-risk groups. So the final message is, if you're in any way in one of the risk groups,
26:18get an antibiotic. Yes. And we will expect there to be continued availability for that and the
26:25vaccine next week. Yes, that's right. And I'm sure it's going to shift over so that there's more
26:30available through GPs. But at the moment, it's through those centres. So that's the way to go.
26:34And so that's all we've got time for this week. Thank you to both of my guests
26:37for joining us. Kent tonight, we'll have all of the latest on this and all the other stories
26:41happening around the county today. And we'll be back next week. Have a good weekend.
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