EU Coronavirus Vaccine Programme Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateBaroness Bull
Main Page: Baroness Bull (Crossbench - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Baroness Bull's debates with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
(4 years, 3 months ago)
Lords ChamberOther EU member states would have been able to take part in the governance of the scheme; we would not. Even though the main development is funded from the EU budget, any individual procurement or orders would come from national budgets. Crucially, we would not have been able to negotiate in parallel with other companies with which we already have a good working relationship.
My Lords, new research from King’s College London, in which I declare my interest as an employee, suggests that immunity from Covid-19 may last just a few months, indicating that mass, or herd, immunity from the disease is not an effective strategy, that vaccination boosters may be required, and that any cavalier approach to infection on the basis that one might as well get it in order to acquire the protection of immunity is woefully misguided. What assessment have the Government made of the impact of these findings on their vaccination strategy and their approach to vaccine development?
The Vaccine Taskforce is of course considering all the academic work being done in this field; it is a rapidly developing sphere of science. I am sure that we welcome the work taking place at the institution mentioned by the noble Baroness, but a lot of other research institutes are already looking into it. There are a number of developing vaccine forms which require different manufacturing processes to produce individual vaccines, and we are of course evaluating all of them.