Chamber and committees

I have been practising that for about a week. I think that it is now acknowledged as a condition and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence published clinical guidelines for it. Her absolute belief is that vaccination was absolutely the way to go. However, I was surprised to hear that there are about 220 confirmed cases, 78 fatalities, 69 probable cases and 70 possible cases. She says that these are relatively very small numbers compared to the vaccine. Nonetheless, these are people who have a condition, who have reacted to delivery of multiple doses of vaccine in a relatively short time. There was inevitably going to be some medical and statistical harm done.

What she was saying is that these are people who have had an adverse reaction to the vaccine and were vilified, pushed away and not listened to at the time, and who have a clinical need. With regard to the issue of communication, her question is, did we communicate the very small potential risk that there was with the vaccine, and, by not doing that, did we create a vulnerability in those few people who had an adverse reaction?

Indeed. There is one more thing that I was going to raise. It is something that I never thought I would be raising, but a constituent has brought this to my attention and it speaks to the communication. My constituent is a nurse of 26 years’ experience, and she has raised the issue of VITT—I suppose that I will have to say out loud that that stands for vaccine-induced immune thrombocytopenia and thrombosis . Did I do that right?

We do not hear much nowadays about the continuing risk of Covid for certain elements of society. We talk about new normals and about going back to what we used to do before the pandemic, without recognising that some people in society are still at risk. What does the new normal really look like for those who are still at risk? Will we require a societal reaction to that? Should we all be asked to adjust our behaviour to protect those who are most at risk? Adam Stachura has been sitting there quietly for a while, so I turn to him first.

I was hoping that you would solve all our problems in a couple of minutes. [Laughter.]

Good morning. I want to wind back a little and ask about communication again. Especially early on, the information that we received evolved and changed. Obviously, I am not in a vulnerable category, but I sometimes found the information to be difficult to follow and I was not quite sure what I should do when I was in public, then eventually when I was not in public. Did that have a disproportionate impact on people in the most vulnerable categories? The impact of Covid on people who are clinically vulnerable is much greater so, potentially, the uncertainty about the information was much greater.

I want to get a bit of background on that; I will start with Professor Pell.

Gillian McElroy, it strikes me that that kind of evolving situation would create issues for the organisation that you look after.

The information evolved, so what was right at the start of the pandemic became wrong as our knowledge improved. Initially, a simple thing like wearing a mask was not proved to have an impact, then it was proved to have an impact. That was difficult for somebody like me, who is not in a vulnerable category, so how difficult was it for people who are clinically vulnerable to accept that kind of change? How could Government change its approach and what lessons can we learn to make the messaging clearer?

I am afraid that that question is for Dr Witcher again.

I am not a silver medallist myself.

As the convener alluded to in his question, what people often share with me is the lack—or the feeling of a lack—of consultation with local communities, as well as their being bullied and steamrollered. In addition, even when the council declines to give planning permission, the decision is often and routinely overturned by the Scottish Government. There is just a lack of connection between local communities and the planning decision itself.

With regard to Mr Ewing’s point, communities have to benefit. The current situation has been described to me as the energy being taken on motorways away from where it is generated and into the central belt, leaving the communities where it is generated running on B roads. It is a very good analogy. It is extremely important that communities feel engaged and that they benefit, which brings us to the point that has been discussed about community shared ownership and whether it should be made mandatory.

I was interested in Mr Ewing’s questions, which I want to follow up on, about using the planning process to encourage wind farm operators to ensure benefit to the local community. Andy Kinnaird responded by highlighting the fact that planning decisions relate to the use of land. Surely the use of land requirement is there for the benefit of the community at large, so I do not see how the two can be divorced. If planning applications were passed, or not, depending on whether there was a shared community benefit element to the proposal, that would surely encourage wind farm operators to follow that route.

It was the biggest, but I have since been corrected, as there is apparently now a bigger one in Holland.

Thank you very much, convener. I would just start by getting the committee to recognise that I represent the South Scotland region, which has, as my postbag reflects, a high propensity of wind farms. I was very interested in the question of the 50MW limit, given that we have Whitelee wind farm, which is the second biggest in Europe and sits just down the road from your constituency, convener, and up the road from mine. It is therefore obviously perfectly feasible to—