Covid-19: Wuhan Institute of Virology

Baroness Pidding Excerpts

Wednesday 30th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, with the greatest of respect to the noble Lord, I am not sure whether the pandemic that just hit us could have been solved by a committee, however august and impressive. We need a national response, and the national response to this pandemic came from the Prime Minister and the top of Government, and involved the entire nation. For that we are enormously grateful.

[Baroness Pidding (Con) [V]]

My Lords, in an article in the Financial Times in May, Sir Patrick Vallance said that the Prime Minister had asked him, ahead of the G7, to pull together relevant experts to start looking at how a future pandemic could be dealt with more swiftly—and, most importantly, on a global basis. Can the Minister advise us what progress has been made on this?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I attended the presentation by Sir Patrick Vallance at the G7 health track in Oxford in June, which was received extremely well, both by Health Ministers from the G7 countries and by the chief executives of the major pharmaceutical companies that are partners in that work. We are using our chairmanship to nudge it along, and it will cover both the pharmaceutical and the demographic elements of pandemic response. This is an example of where Britain is showing leadership in the world to carve out a clear idea of how we can respond to pandemics better in the future.