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The NHS recovery plan, which is our plan for the next five years and is backed by £1 billion of investment, as Brian Whittle knows, provides a high-level overview of what we intend to do to increase the capacity for in-patients, out-patients, diagnostics and treatment for cancer and mental health, for example. I will not rehearse what is in that plan, because it is available for everyone to see.

The point about long-term planning is really important, because the NHS faces an immediate challenge, an immediate crisis and immediate pressures. That also applies across social care. We are dealing with those things, but it would be wrong not to think about the long term, which is why we have committed to producing a workforce strategy by the end of the calendar year. Trade unions and staff-side representatives will, of course, be integral in helping us to understand the challenge.

The strategy will need to show a degree of flexibility because, frankly, we do not yet fully know what the indirect health impacts of Covid-19, which Alex Rowley spoke about, are. That is because, as I keep saying, we are still in the midst of the pandemic.

Everything that Brian Whittle said about the health impacts and the scale of the challenge that we face was absolutely right. I often say in the chamber that Covid-19 is the biggest shock that our NHS has faced in 73 years, not just because of its direct impact, which is huge and significant in its own right, but because of the indirect impacts, which will last for years. I always do my best to be up front with the public in saying that we cannot expect to solve those problems in the space of weeks or even a couple of months, because it will take years to do so. That is why our recovery plan is a five-year one.

On the points that Brian Whittle raised the other day about the number of entrants into specific courses, we are working hard on that with schools and higher and further education institutions. Our fill rate is good, as we saw from statistics that were released recently. However, if we dig deeper into those statistics at a more granular level, we begin to see where we need to do a bit more work. Brian Whittle was therefore right to raise those issues in his question.

There is simply no doubt that mental health challenges have been exacerbated by the pandemic. That is not to say that there were not challenges before the pandemic. There were significant challenges, but they have been exacerbated.

I have been saddened to see, even in my constituency, the number of people, including young people, who have completed suicide over the course of the pandemic. I had not seen those numbers in my constituency in past years, so that has been extremely saddening. Other members could probably say the same. Although we are funding crisis interventions, for example, in our child and adolescent mental health services, we are also funding pre-crisis interventions and initiatives at a community level, to stop people getting to that crisis point.

I assume that it met. Forgive me, but I have not seen the outcome. As the member knows, the First Minister made her statement on Tuesday so, if there were any significant announcements to make, I am sure that she would have made them. My officials might wish to add something, but—

Yes. On the ventilation point in particular, we will be happy to provide updates.

That is a good question. A lot is going on in the social media space. We try to get clinicians to lead a lot of that work, but we also use social media influencers as well as we possibly can, since they—as the name suggests—carry significant influence among people who are on social media, where a lot of that disinformation is spread. Sometimes that works well, but there are obvious examples of where it has not worked as well as we had anticipated.

I would also caution against thinking that disinformation is just in the social media space, because it is not. There have been examples, even in Scotland, of people rocking up to school gates and presenting a letter that looks like an NHS information leaflet but which contains a host of disinformation. We have reacted very quickly to that and have been to speak to the school and send communications to the parents of the children who were involved.

Countering disinformation is going to take a multi-pronged approach. Our social media and digital activity is going to have to involve taking on quite robustly some of the disinformation that exists. It is a multi-pronged approach to, frankly, a global issue that we are all trying to deal with.

I am pleased to see that some social media sites, such as Instagram, I believe, say quite clearly whether information that is posted about Covid-19 is certified or not—forgive me if I am wrong about that being Instagram; I am on quite a lot of platforms. We should encourage social media companies to do a lot more to tackle disinformation where they can.

You have asked a number of very good questions.

First, the Republic of Ireland was ahead of us in introducing a vaccination certification scheme. Indeed, I noticed an article on the BBC news website in which immunology expert Professor Kingston Mills of Trinity College Dublin said that, if it had not been for the certification scheme, uptake of the vaccine

“would have been much lower”

and that the scheme had been a “big incentive” for people to get jabbed. We will keep Scotland’s figures under close review, but I note that, in the two weeks after we made the announcement on 1 September, there was a 10 per cent increase in vaccine uptake in the 18 to 29-year-old age group. As we know, the younger the age group, the lower the uptake tends to be, so that was a positive sign.

Vaccine uptake is lower among not just younger age groups and minority ethnic groups but people from more deprived areas, and we will monitor those groups as the vaccination certification scheme gets embedded in the hope that uptake will increase. However, as I am sure some of your advisers will have highlighted, the point is that anything that we can do to increase uptake will be important. We do not want people in the groups that have a lower uptake of the vaccine not to go to live events, late venues, the football and so on. We are working hard to ensure that the information on certification is, for example, translated into other languages.

On your last question, we are not planning for legislation. We will do everything that we can to counter misinformation without going down a legislative route. That is for a number of reasons, one of which is that legislation takes time and we want to counter misinformation now. However, we will keep the matter under review.

Causation can be difficult to prove definitively. I know that, for example, when we took a targeted approach to 18 to 29-year-olds—young people—the feedback on that messaging was positive. I will see whether we can get more certain information on causation, and we can write to the convener, who can distribute that information to committee members. Causation can be difficult to prove.

I do not think that any group has a natural tendency to not get vaccinated. Even among groups in which vaccine uptake is lower, uptake is still high, which is positive—it is just lower than that for other groups. We must ensure that we continue to make the vaccine as accessible as possible to individuals from groups with lower uptake rates. As restrictions ease and as case numbers, thankfully, begin to reduce, we have a challenge in telling people, “Look, you still have to get vaccinated. We are thankful that life is getting back to some sort of normality, but it is an unpredictable virus, and there could be future spikes, so you do not want to be unprotected.” The figures for people who are hospitalised and become seriously ill among those who are vaccinated versus those who are unvaccinated tell their own story.

Before I answer the question, I should say that you should contact the health board if there are particular issues that you feel it should look at, but I am, of course, happy to explore the issue as health secretary if you want me to.

You are right to suggest that there is a balance to be struck. We want to get as many people as possible fully vaccinated, but if we allowed everyone to choose their vaccine, we could have supply issues that would give us real worry and concern. When some of the initial data came out about AstraZeneca and the potential for side-effects, particularly blood clots, in the under-40s, a number of people, some of whom were over 40, wanted the Pfizer vaccine, and we had to take a robust line if we did not want to run into supply issues. I think that we have struck the right balance at the moment, and I think that that view is justified when you look at the percentage of people who are fully vaccinated.

We hope that the portal will help with that issue.

That is an excellent question, although I am not sure that I would phrase it in the same way and talk about drawing a line in the sand because, prior to Covid, the Government—and, in fairness, the Parliament; we worked quite well and collaboratively across parties—made significant progress on the public health agenda. Significant progress was made on smoking cessation—I do not need to go into detail on the importance of that for reducing preventable deaths. Good progress was also being made on the ambition around obesity. I should say again that that issue was part of a shared four-nations agenda; I raised it with the other health ministers of the four nations. Although we have some issues with the UK Health and Care Bill, I agree with some of the public health policy that the UK Government is trying to introduce, particularly for tackling obesity and unhealthy food, on a point of principle. However, it has undoubtedly been the case that, because of the pandemic and our focus on Covid, we have had to pause some of the good work that we were doing. Certainly, the focus of our marketing and communications, which we have already spoken about, has absolutely been on getting information out about Covid, whether that has been about vaccines, good hygiene measures or something else.

What we have to do—I have spoken to Public Health Scotland about this in the not-too-distant past—is try to pivot back to some of those core and important public health messages. I think that that is what Brian Whittle was alluding to. He is right: the outcomes can be worse for people with Covid if they have other underlying health conditions. We have to understand the data on that a bit better; Professor Steedman can speak more to that from a clinical perspective. We will have to try to pivot back to those important public health initiatives and communications.

I know that Brian Whittle understands this fully, but I say to him that we are not out of the pandemic; we are still in the midst of it. I will not pre-empt today’s figures, but I think that yesterday’s figures showed that we still had between 2,000 and 3,000 cases a day. The figures are still extraordinarily high. If it were not for the effects of the vaccine and we were seeing the high case numbers of a year ago, we would be in lockdown.

Yes. Indeed, one of the key meetings that I had early on as health secretary was with cybersecurity experts. Frankly, there is still work to be done in that respect. We have seen some of these issues aired publicly, with the previous breaches of cybersecurity in some health boards, so we must ensure that our systems are robust.

Generally when it comes to our digital tech and infrastructure in the NHS, we have a way to go. That goes not just for the issues with the Covid app, which I would be happy to talk about in more detail; in general, the ambitions that we have for digital infrastructure are just that: very ambitious. We need to move ahead on them at scale and at pace. However, we are doing a lot of work with health boards and others to try to bolster our cybersecurity, because it is incredibly important.