 Keir Starmer's talent for getting his opinion pieces in Tory newspapers continued this weekend with an article on vaccinating teachers. The piece was headlined. So Keir Starmer, let's harness the spirit that has made us the envy of the world to get every child back to school. So in the piece he argued or he said, I share the government's ambition to make it a national mission to reopen our schools. I will do everything in my power as leader of the Labour Party to make that happen. I have offered to work with the Prime Minister on this, including calling for the opening of Nightingale-style classrooms and I renew that commitment today. He says, I believe we can take a further step towards reopening our schools by getting our teachers and school staff vaccinated as soon as possible as the mail on Sunday has called for. Now this proposal which Labour have had since about last week, they've said, to get our kids back into school quickly, get to vaccinate the teachers, has had some pushback from the Conservatives and some people in the media because it is seen as going against the proposals from the JCVI, I'll talk a bit more about those in them in a moment, and potentially it would mean pushing down more vulnerable people down the priority list. We'll talk about the details of that in one moment. First of all, this is Starmer's response because he tries to preempt that argument. He writes, this is not about deprioritizing existing groups. That is not what I'm calling for. It is about having the ambition to do both. I've met the staff at the vaccine centres and I know they are up for this challenge. We can capture that spirit by going further, faster and smarter too. For example, we should be looking at how we can use our supply more efficiently. It's estimated that 5% of vaccines are wasted. That could mean more than 120,000 a week based on recent numbers or the equivalent of more than 10% of school staff in England. That last part of the argument I don't find particularly convincing is Kierstarmer essentially saying, look, Britain has the fastest vaccination rollout of any major country in the world, any non-very small country in the world, but I think it can get faster. We don't have to make tough decisions because let's just make the fastest rollout even faster. I do, however, think there are some good arguments for vaccinating teachers first. So what people have been pointing out, which is very true, is the key reason that schools are closed right now is not because teachers are at risk of getting coronavirus, it's because of their impact on community transmission. Clearly with COVID-19 so widespread in the country and with so many people in vulnerable categories, not vaccinated, it would not be safe to open schools at this point in time and vaccinating teachers wouldn't change that. However, I can imagine a time in the near future where there is a non-negligible risk of community transmission by kids going back to schools, but as deciding collectively as society that it's worth it. It's worth kids going back to school while there's still some risk of them getting COVID-19 and taking it back to their families, presumably by that point in time you'd have the most vulnerable people have been vaccinated but still there is a risk of it spreading. Now in that situation, I would say it does actually, there's a good argument for vaccinating teachers because if we are asking people to go into a situation where they are at more risk of catching it than anyone else and remember there's long COVID, it's not just dying from COVID, which is a problem. Then I think fairness says we should probably give them more protection. And so if we do open schools before everyone has a vaccine, which most people are suggesting we will, then I think we should probably give that extra protection to teachers. Ash, what do you think about this particular call from Keir Starmer that teachers should be vaccinated as soon as possible? I mean, he specifically said in the February half term. So the reason why I don't think it will necessarily happen during the February half term is because the vaccination priority list has been designed so that you get the biggest impact on hospitalizations and deaths possible which frees up your vaccination capacity because the more you have a health service which is overburdened with hospitalizations and treating COVID cases, the less efficient it is at handling a nationwide vaccination rollout. So that's one of the reasons why it's been designed as it is. So if you want to get teachers higher up that list, say ahead of clinically vulnerable under 50s, then you start slowing down the vaccination of those groups and you increase the risk of undermining the vaccination rollout itself and then it becomes counterproductive. So that's one issue that I have there. I don't object to the idea that once you have made your way through that rollout, that vaccination rollout priority list that you then move based on exposure. So you've got teachers, you've got bus drivers, you've got security guards, you've got cleaners, you've got people who work in roles where you cannot work from home and you are exposed to other people. I think absolutely you prioritize those who are most exposed. I think that you're right, there is a case to take that risk a little bit more with schools than you would with other settings and vaccinating teachers would be a huge part of it. One of the problems with how Keir Starmer's framing it is that, well, as I've just said about undermining the vaccine rollout priority list that risks undermining the vaccine rollout overall. The second thing is when he says, well, you know, look at how much goes to waste every day, it's roughly 5%. It's not necessarily that you can then requisition that 5% capacity in redirect elsewhere. Usually it's from things like misappointments and so you've got vaccines which have been transported, they've been taken out of the cold storage where they've got to be and then they've got to be used very, very quickly. So maybe you then have some kind of local system based on local authority records about who works in which key worker role and you can informally start ringing people up in the area and say, hey, come get this vaccine. But the idea of simply redirecting that 5%, I don't think it's as simple as Keir Starmer's making out. But it sounds good, doesn't it? Sounds good where you go, look, 5% goes to waste, it can go anywhere. Logistically, that would be really difficult. Yeah, I mean, it's unlikely that no one thought of that already. You know, you can imagine Keir Starmer going around putting a sort of teacher's jar in every vaccination booth. It's like, if there's anything left in the bottle, pour it in the teacher's jar and then we can give it to everyone at halftime. I feel like, you know, the vaccination program is going quite well. I think they've probably done a lot of this troubleshooting. And we're going to go to Rachel Reeves being challenged on this by Andrew Ma. Before we do that, if you're new to Navarra Media, new to Tiskey's Hour, make sure you do hit that subscribe button. We go live every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7 p.m. and put out videos every day on the issues that matter in British and world politics. On the Andrew Ma show yesterday morning, so on Sunday morning, Rachel Reeves who leads on Labour's response to the pandemic was challenged on whether the call to vaccinate teachers was backed by the science. So in his question here, Ma quoted statements from the JCVI, which is the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation. That's a sort of government panel of scientists who advise the government on this and the ONS, which is the Office for National Statistics. The JCVI have looked at this and I'm going to quote from their report. They say they do not advise further prioritization by occupation during the first phase of this program. And you quoted the ONS just now. Again, quoting the ONS, rates of death they say, including COVID-19 and men and women, who worked as teaching and educational professionals such as secondary school teachers were not statistically significantly raised when compared with the rates seen in the general population. In other words, on both sides, the JCVI and the ONS have both looked at this and they have both concluded that your policy of vaccinating teachers first or vaccinating teachers during the half-term is wrong. No, well, Andrew, first of all, we're not saying in phase one. Phase one should be completed by the middle of February. We're not saying that teachers should be vaccinated in phase one. We're saying in the second phase, can we bring teachers in? And second phase starts at half-term. So we're not suggesting in phase one. We're suggesting in phase two. And second, when schools went back in the beginning of September, within a couple of weeks, 25,000 teachers were out of the classroom having to self-isolate. The only way we're going to get kids back to school is not banding around dates as the government are doing. Putting in place a proper plan and that involves vaccinations. And Liz Trosser said that this morning is vaccinations and testing in schools and the better wearing of masks. Rachel Reeves makes one good point there about sort of absences and teachers having to take time off. I'll talk about that in one moment. First of all, I've often said throughout this pandemic, Andrew Maher isn't particularly good at political interviews because he doesn't actually know enough about COVID-19 to hold anyone to account because Rachel Reeves there did tell a bit of a porkey because she said the Labour Party will not be proposing that teachers are vaccinated in the period of phase one of the rollout. Andrew Maher there read out a quote saying, we as the JCVI do not think that people should be vaccinated according to occupation in phase one. Rachel Reeves suggested, well, phase one will be over in mid-February. That's not true. She is making out there that phase one is the government imposed target, which is vaccinating the four most vulnerable groups of people before mid-February. Actually, the JCVI includes in phase one, everyone who's considered in any way vulnerable. So everyone over 50 and anyone with existing conditions. Let's get up from the government website what the JCVI counts as phase one. Just to prove to you, I'm not telling porkeys. So say phase one, direct prevention of mortality and supporting the NHS and COVID and social care system. It says the JVCI advises that the first priorities for the COVID vaccination program should be the prevention of mortality and the maintenance of the health and social care systems as the risk of mortality. From COVID-19 increases with age prioritization is primarily based on age. The order of priority for each group in the population corresponds with data on the number of individuals who would need to be vaccinated to prevent one death. And then you can see in groups one to nine, you have everyone from residents of care homes to everyone over 50 and on the way you have people who are between 16 and 64 with underlying health conditions. So labor are encouraging the government to go against JCVI guidelines. So you can argue that they are arguing for a position which there could be scientific arguments for it but it is going against the advice of the scientific body that have been set up to provide this advice. So Rachel Reeves was wrong there even if Andrew Marl didn't realize it. On the point about absences, I do think she has a good point. What I potentially would have said if I was Rachel Reeves is that the quote that Andrew Marl wrote about the ONS is quite misleading. So he was saying, the ONS have said, look, there's no extra risk to teachers in terms of deaths, they have said that. So in terms of deaths, the ONS have said, if you look at teachers compared to other essential workers, they've got no more likelihood of dying than people in similar jobs. Infections though is potentially quite different. So when it comes to infections, teachers seem to, especially in November and December, get infected at up to three times the rate of the rest of the population and it makes sense. You've got lots of people in a room, very little protection, mask wearing, et cetera. So she could have pushed back on that particular point. Ash, do you think it is dangerous for the Labour Party to be seen to be contradicting the JCVI, which is the fairly objective and independent scientific body advising the government on who should be vaccinated first? No, I don't think it is simply because nothing the Labour Party does matters all that much at this juncture. So all that they would do is sort of undermine Keir Starmer's position at Prime Minister's questions. What's more dangerous, I think, is that where the Labour Party departs from the demands of the Labour movement, i.e. the teachers unions, workers unions and other sectors as well. So then you start asking the question of, well, who are the Labour Party for? Who are they supposed to be politically representing and how are they going to go about doing that? So that, for me, is where the danger is and it's one of sort of political affinity. But no, more generally, it's not dangerous for Labour to do that at all. It's just that they sort of sacrifice their moral authority to talk about things later down the lines. If they start questioning aspects of the government's vaccine rollout, then Boris Johnson can say, well, I put a user that you rejected the priority list as put out by the... Sorry, I cannot remember the acronym, the JCWI. JCVI. JCVI on vaccinations and immunisations. Brilliant. See, I'm so bad at remembering letters, Vs and Ws, I get really mixed up. But yeah, it's a political problem, I think, more than a public health problem. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think again, this is similar to the question we discussed earlier about travel restrictions. The reason Labour are going hard on this is because they see there is some political advantage for them. So the level at which I think potentially this is quite irresponsible in terms of public health is this is all really part of a manoeuvre by the Labour Party to put loads of pressure on the Conservatives to get everyone back in school by the 9th of March. You saw that headline from Keir Starmer, which was saying, let's have every child back in school. Now, even if we vaccinated all the teachers, that wouldn't be safe. So, you know, I don't think Keir Starmer should be rushing schools to reopen, especially not without rotors, for example. If you're saying vaccinate the teachers and everyone can go back, that's not good public health. But what people at home are going to hear, and I think this is what Keir Starmer is hoping, you've got lots of people, lots of parents who are like, I want my kid to go back to school. One, maybe they're going to get annoyed by their kid at home. Also, they're seeing that potentially they're falling behind or they're struggling. And then they hear on the radio that the Labour Party is saying, we support this one neat trick that means your kids can go back to school. And they're like, well, that sounds good. I quite like the idea that there's this one neat trick to send my kids back to school. So that's where I think potentially you've got opportunism over public health more so than on them disagreeing with the JCVI. And I think there are lots of good arguments to disagree with the JCVI on this, because I think fairness comes into it how much risk are people putting themselves in if you're a 50-year-old office worker, you have the option of staying at home and avoiding risking COVID-19 before you get your vaccination. If you are a teacher and schools are reopened and you're 49, you don't get that choice. So it seems to me that fairness suggests that we should consider vaccinating not only teachers but bus drivers and anyone who we're asking to go into harm's way to give them extra protection.