Medicines and Medical Devices Bill

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords & Report: 1st sitting & Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Tuesday 12th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, and to join the noble Lords, Lord Alton of Liverpool and Lord Crisp, in backing her important amendment. The introduction the noble Baroness provided was powerful and comprehensive, so I will not speak at length. I endorse the two asks she put to the Minister; it is important that we hear very clear, direct answers to them.

As the noble Baroness powerfully put it, there is a contest between public need and private profit, and we know that the reality of how our current system works is that private profit comes first. That means that human rights and public health trail behind. We know that so much of our healthcare system has been dragged in the direction of the disastrous US model, the most extreme example on the planet of a private, profit-driven healthcare system that has disastrous outcomes for massive costs. We also know that there are healthcare systems around the world that spend even less than we do but have a very fair and reasonable distribution of resources and money.

We often talk about these issues in moral terms; we must make sure that everyone has these medicines, and I endorse that moral approach, but in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, nationally and globally, we must come back to the phrase, “No one is safe until everyone is safe.” It is in everyone’s interest that everybody in the UK and around the world has access to the best possible medicines and medical devices and that the research effort and all that wonderful power of human ingenuity are put into the best possible causes and results for public health, for the good of us all.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I spoke at some length on this issue in Committee and am delighted that the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, has given us the opportunity to explore it again. She has done so with her usual thoroughness and thought. I am also pleased to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, who spoke so well. The noble Lord, Lord Bethell, has exchanged letters, as the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, referred to; that has been extremely helpful, as she intimated, and I think will avoid the need for a Division, but it is right we explore this issue thoroughly.

I will not repeat all the detailed arguments made in Committee, but, in headline terms, Amendment 10 is being considered in the context of exclusive intellectual property rights which can in some circumstances create monopolies, leading to high prices and supply issues for medicines and medical devices. We are seeing those issues come to the fore in the Covid-19 response.

In an Oral Question that I asked on the Floor of your Lordships’ House on 30 November to the Trade Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Grimstone, I argued that in the context of hundreds of millions of Covid vaccines being held in the United Kingdom and the significant sums of public money invested in developing new drugs and treatments, notwithstanding the need to generate funds to enable future research and development, when companies such as Gilead repurpose drugs such as remdesivir and charge $2,340 for a Covid treatment that Liverpool University estimates can be done for $9, the Government should invoke their powers in such circumstances to use Crown licences to prevent patent monopolies impeding access to medicine, to ensure equitable access, prevent exploitative profiteering and recognise that affordable drugs and their fair distribution are a public good that this country should be at the forefront in providing.

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[Lord Ribeiro (Con) [V]]

My Lords, like the noble Lords who have spoken before me, I thank the Minister and the Government for accepting our amendment. I believe it sends a powerful message, not only to China but to other countries such as Pakistan and India, to which I referred in my speech of 28 October in Committee. In discussion with the Foreign Office, through the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, we were reassured that the diplomatic strategy would be to continue lobbying as many countries as possible on the issue of human rights and the immoral practice of forced organ harvesting. With the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, we undertook to raise awareness with the British Medical Association and the surgical royal colleges.

It is worth noting the World Health Organization’s Guiding Principles on Human Cell, Tissue and Organ Transplantation. Any programme such as the kidney pairing exchange, which makes it possible to utilise kidneys that are biologically incompatible between patients and their genetically or emotionally related donors, must follow and respect the WHO’s Guiding Principles of practice, particularly principles 3 and 5, which are worth quoting.

Principle 3 says:

“Live donations are acceptable when the donor’s informed and voluntary consent is obtained, when professional care of donors is ensured and follow-up is well organized, and when selection criteria for donors are scrupulously applied and monitored. Live donors should be informed of the probable risks, benefits and consequences of donation in a complete and understandable fashion; they should be legally competent and capable of weighing the information; and they should be acting willingly, free of any undue influence or coercion.”


Principle 5 states:

“Cells, tissues and organs should only be donated freely, without any monetary payment or other reward of monetary value. Purchasing, or offering to purchase, cells, tissues or organs for transplantation, or their sale by living persons or by the next of kin for deceased persons, should be banned.”


In 2017, the World Health Assembly supported a concept of financial neutrality to protect vulnerable people from being exploited. That is the essence of what this amendment achieves, and I am grateful to the Government and to the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, and the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, for endorsing it. I hope that they will maintain their pressure on the WHO to end these practices.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I start, as others have done, by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, and the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, for the way in which they have engaged with noble Lords such as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, who has put so much work into this—along with the noble Baronesses, Lady Finlay and Lady Northover, and the noble Lord, Lord Ribeiro—in trying to draw our attention to the enormity of the depredations that have occurred in China through forced organ harvesting. It is very productive that, this evening, the Government have been able to come forward with an amendment that has been agreed with the sponsors of the Committee amendment, having listened to the argument. I am especially grateful, as others have been, to the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, for the way in which she has engaged.

I will come back in a few moments, if I may, to two other issues that I have raised with her but which are not included in this amendment. They concern consent and the equipment that could be used in the extraction, freezing and harvesting of organs in China, and the question of whether, if British companies were involved in the production of such equipment, there is anything that we could do to forestall that.

On consent, the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, mentioned that, thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, we have now seen the reports of the Human Tissue Authority of 2018 following its visit to the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham to examine the plastinated bodies that had been taken there. These were corpses that had been put on public display—what the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, referred to as part of a sort of travelling circus. A second exhibition was held later in the year.

It was extraordinarily naïve—at best—that no more probing was done into the origins of those bodies or how consent could possibly have been given from unknown, anonymised sources. Of course, it leaves the question hanging in the air of whether these were people who had been executed—they probably had been. Sadly, we know that that is the fate of many people, whether they are Falun Gong practitioners or people from different denominational minorities or faith communities, including the Uighurs. We have heard much already this evening, as well as in the Statement from the Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, in the House of Commons this afternoon, about the plight of 1 million people who have been incarcerated because they will not conform to the diktats of the Chinese Communist Party.

It is extraordinary that such things can happen in the 21st century, but they are happening. That is why we have to be vigilant and do what we can to prevent the exploitation of people who are caught up in these circumstances. I think particularly this evening of a young woman called Zhang Zhan, who was arrested as a citizen journalist. She is a lawyer by background and had gone to Wuhan to investigate the origins of the coronavirus. She has been languishing in a jail ever since, for some of the time on hunger strike. We know that many dissidents—people who have spoken out against the regime—including lawyers, have been arrested, and some have disappeared, never to be seen again.

Therefore, it is crucial that we discover the origins of the bodies that are used in these sorts of exhibitions and displays, which I personally believe should be prohibited in their entirety. The idea that they can be paraded for macabre purposes should fill people with a sense of disgust. The anonymity of the cadavers should have made the Human Tissue Authority see that this was an issue that it should not just have turned a blind eye to. It is not good enough simply to say that we have a strong regulatory authority. We do: we have strong regulations, many of which came out following the scandal at Alder Hey in Liverpool. However, since then, we have failed to plug the loophole that I and others identified in 2018. We used that phrase—a loophole—in a letter to the Times, but it also appeared in an article in the Lancet. There was a loophole that needed to be filled when it came to organs and tissues from outside the United Kingdom.

The amendment goes some way to addressing that but I think that there also needs to be further regulation on the issue of consent. I also feel—and I would like to press the Minister on this—that we must do more about the export of equipment from the United Kingdom that could be used in forced organ harvesting. Maybe this could be done through export licence control. I noticed in the Statement to the House of Commons this afternoon and in the letter that has been circulated to Peers this evening by the right honourable Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary, that he talks about there being a review of export controls as they apply to the situation in Xinjiang. He says that these measures are among the most stringent being implemented globally to help ensure that supply chains are free from forced labour.

That is welcome, but how ironic it would be if, in stopping coming into this country things that have been manufactured by slave labour in Xinjiang, we permitted the export of things to Xinjiang and elsewhere in China that were being used in the extraction, freezing and transportation of body parts in order to enable China to promote one of the biggest organ industries in the world. The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, was right to say that we also need to do far more about the phenomenon of people travelling to other parts of the world to take organs from others. That kind of organ tourism is something that the British Government need to do more about.

That is all that I want to say. I look forward to hearing the reply from the noble Baroness, Lady Penn.