Seòmar agus comataidhean

Yes, please.

I go to back to something that we talked about with Professor Leitch last week. After that exchange, I was contacted by a constituent regarding natural, as opposed to vaccination, immunity. I do not know whether it is correct, but I have been sent reams of “evidence” that natural immunity is more effective than vaccine immunity because you have been exposed to the virus’s entire sequence of about 30,000 genes, whereas the vaccine is primarily focused on the spike element. Lots of people say that they want to have the same freedoms as everybody else because they have had Covid, but they do not want to have the vaccine. How do you answer the belief that natural immunity is as strong as the immunity from vaccination?

Okay, but that leaves a question for the Government. If that person knows that they have had Covid and the timing of it, because they had a positive test, are their rights being impinged if they say that they do not want to have the vaccine because they know from the positive test result that they have a certain amount of immunity? Why should that person not be given the freedom to say that having had the disease is their “vaccine”?

Best of luck with that, then, lads.

Unfortunately, being the sixth person to ask questions, a lot of my stuff has already been brought through, although there are some details that are missing for me, so you will get a wee stream of consciousness here.

First, it has twice been mentioned this morning that the Welsh system requires a passport or a test. Am I not right in thinking that it is both? People still need the passport to get into venues in Wales, and the number of places is being increased. Is it not both there, as opposed to one or the other?

I absolutely take that point on board. As I say, I am merely passing on the views of my constituent. On compulsory vaccination for care home workers, which the committee has spoken about before, a company in my constituency has made that a stipulation and I totally agree with that because, like you, I speak to people who have lost loved ones to Covid.

I want to move on very quickly to an issue that has been raised previously: long Covid. I know that we are still battling with the pandemic, but, from what I am hearing from others, long Covid has the potential to create long-term damage long after we come out of the current period. A group called Long Covid Kids has been set up by the parents of children as young as two or three years old who have had Covid and now have severe problems. I am not asking a question—I am merely urging the Government to look seriously at what is happening with kids with Covid.

Or if it is not trying to avoid it but saying, “We cannot do that because of this.”

Something has just popped into my mind. The World Health Organization has a definition of what a health-promoting school is, which I think does what you have just described. It encompasses the environment and everything else. Has that been considered in the process of putting the bill together?

That goes back to what I said in response to Rachael Hamilton’s questions about creating a culture where that is what we aspire to.

Does that mean that there is scope to say that something is still there in the plan if a local authority is trying to avoid doing it?

It goes back to something that George Burgess said earlier on. You will have to forgive me, George—I am a new MSP, so I have daft laddie questions. Finlay Carson mentioned the potential for an oversight body to be set up. Are there not already public bodies that could absorb the role of being an oversight body?