Chamber and committees

There is a lot of misinformation, which the committee looked at previously, about vaccines and vaccine damage. I do not know whether you agree, but it is my view that it would help if we could get some simple figures out, such as the one that I still use a lot, which is that vaccines saved 20 million lives. I assume that the number has gone up, although I still use that figure. Simple messages like that might get through to people. Someone came into my office last Friday who was still very wary of the vaccines and needed some reassurance.

Okay, thanks.

Comparisons with myalgic encephalomyelitis have come through in the inquiry. ME has been around for 40 years—or, at least, it has been recognised for that length of time. We all know sufferers of ME. We have never found a cure for or an answer to it, and it has been difficult to pin down. Is that where we are going with long Covid—that it will continue to be incredibly difficult to pin down and we will probably not get one simple solution?

On the theme of educating people, we would expect that, in the health service, there would be a good understanding of long Covid, but a lot of other employers, such as those in the private sector, might not understand the condition and what they could and should do to support employees. Is any work going on, or can any work go on, for employers, such as small employers who do not know an awful lot about the topic?

Yes—I think that we had evidence earlier that a lot of the people with long Covid had Covid before there was a vaccine available. Is that broadly the case?

I take your point that there might be general public awareness of long Covid, but we continue to have problems in certain sectors of the community that are not engaged with health services anyway. Men in more deprived areas hardly ever engage unless there is something very seriously wrong, and vaccine uptake tends to be worse among some ethnic minorities and in poorer areas. What work are we doing—and what could we do—to engage with the people who have not been so engaged in the past?

Everything that you say leads to more possible questions, but I will ask you just one more. I go back to what you say in your report, under the heading “Responsible and accountable government”, with regard to who the MSPs and elected members are. You say that there should be “a clear link between” how the citizens vote and members of Parliament, and therefore the Executive. I do not know whether we have that at the moment.

I am more interested in the second bullet point, in which you refer to

“The recruitment of elected politicians from a diverse pool of candidates, to boost the representativeness of parliaments in relation to social background.”

We have tried to get a balance between men and women. What could we do to really get a cross-section of society in Parliament? Is that another impossibility?

Okay. I shall restrain myself from asking anything else.

So it is fairer to invest in all the kids aged two or three, but we still need some high-quality graduates and, therefore, to be efficient as a country, we have to invest. Is that the contrast?

I get that. We could spend ages discussing what “fair” is and so on. I will leave that.

Near the beginning of your report, under the heading “What do ‘effective government’ principles mean in practice?”, you talk about the “wide range of ... ambitions” that we have in Scotland, and you go on to list some of them. Do we have too many ambitions? Is one of the problems that we are trying to do too many things?

Professor Cairney, your paper is full of contrasts or, some would say, paradoxes. Colleagues have mentioned a few, and I will mention a few more.

Under the heading “Fostering equity, fairness, or justice”, you talk about the focus

“on efficiency, using economic tools … to identify how to produce the highest benefits from the same costs”,

but you say that policy

“should also prioritise the fair distribution of costs and benefits.”

Is it not possible to be efficient and fair?