Biosecurity and Infectious Diseases

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, we should be grateful to my noble friend Lord Trees for securing this wide-ranging debate. I will focus on the threat of global pandemics to humans.

Covid-19 was a wake-up call. The published national risk register had been inadequate. No pandemic other than flu was rated as a major threat. Covid was primarily a medical catastrophe but it cascaded into other sectors: to schools and, through its impact on supply chains, manufacturing. There needs to be more joined-up government thinking and firmer guidelines about who, regionally and centrally, has authority in emergencies.

It is welcome that the risk register has been improved. Especially welcome are the comprehensive Biological Security Strategy, published just last September, and the strengthening of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention at its 2022 review. The 100-day mission concept to have a vaccine within 100 days of identifying a threat was launched at the G7 in 2021 when the UK held the chair. Can the Minister provide an update on what has happened to follow that up? All these measures need to be global. The earlier a new virus can be identified, the greater the head start in responding before a global spread.

Importantly, pandemics not only spread faster and more globally than they did in the past but cause far worse societal breakdown. European villages in the 14th century continued to function even when the Black Death halved their populations. In contrast, societies today are vulnerable to serious unrest as soon as hospitals are overwhelmed, which could occur before the fatality rate is even 1%. That is why we need to contemplate a societal or ecological collapse that would be a truly global setback. Covid-19 is not the worst that could happen.

The origin of Covid-19 is controversial. A leakage from the Wuhan lab cannot be ruled out. Be that as it may, we cannot rule out future lab leakages. I recall, for example, that a foot and mouth outbreak in the UK was caused by a leakage from the Pirbright lab in 2007. There is surely a case for enhancing security and independent monitoring of the level 4 labs around the world that are researching these lethal pathogens and, more importantly, ensuring that experiments on lethal pathogens are not done in less secure labs.

Can we rule out a future release that is intentional rather than accidental? To be sure, Governments and even terrorist groups with specific aims will always be inhibited from releasing engineered pandemics because no one can predict where and how far they can spread. The real nightmare would be a deranged loner with biotech expertise who did not care who became infected, or how many.

In contrast to the elaborate, conspicuous equipment needed to create a nuclear weapon, which can feasibly be monitored by international inspectors, biotech involves small-scale, dual-use technology that will become widely accessible. There are thousands of academic and industrial labs around the world where dangerous pathogens are being studied and modified. An increasing number of individuals will acquire the requisite expertise. The dangers are looming even larger. Regulation of biotech is needed ever more today.

However, what is really scary are doubts about global enforcement. Could the regulations be enforced throughout the world any more effectively than drug or tax laws can? Whatever can be done may be done by someone, somewhere. This is the stuff of nightmares.

The rising empowerment of malign, tech-savvy groups, or even individuals, by biotech will pose an intractable challenge to Governments and aggravate the tension between freedom, privacy, and security. The world is unprepared for the moral and practical challenges posed by burgeoning biotechnology in general. These scenarios call for clear thinking and well-crafted policies that recognise both biotech’s stupendous potential for human flourishing and its huge potential risk to our safety—indeed, to humanity itself.

We must hope that vaccines and antidotes become ever more effective and speedily produced, in step with the growing threat, and that the UK can indeed achieve influence in what has to be a global programme.

Brexit: Environment and Climate Change

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Thursday 23rd March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, I should first crave the House’s indulgence for my delayed arrival this afternoon, and I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, for missing the first few minutes of his speech. As his excellent report makes clear, we learn a great deal about the earth’s climate and environment by monitoring it from space, and I should like to comment on the highly sophisticated pan-European Copernicus programme, in which this country has a big stake.

We have become aware in recent months of unsuspected extra downsides to Brexit—those stemming from the EU’s pervasive involvement in high-tech activities that can be handled only on an integrated European level. For instance, there has been a disconcerting realisation that our membership of Euratom would lapse after Brexit, necessitating the hassle of somehow ensuring continuity in its essential activities.

Many had thought that our involvement in space activities would be unperturbed, because the European Space Agency—ESA—is governed by a separate convention, and we will remain part of it. That is fortunately true of the scientific parts of ESA’s programme, but it is not true of other space activities. The EU and ESA have a joint European space strategy and the EU is the biggest financial contributor to ESA’s budget. In consequence, our participation in Galileo, the European counterpart of GPS, will need some renegotiation. However, what is relevant to today’s debate is that the same is true for the Copernicus programme—a very ambitious European suite of satellites, important for monitoring many aspects of the environment and climate. Copernicus promises to be the world’s pre-eminent earth observation system.

Outside the EU, the UK will have a weaker voice in Copernicus programmes, and in Galileo’s too. It is unlikely that significant infrastructure related to these programmes will be located in this country. The UK has so far invested around €860 million in the Copernicus programme—initially via ESA but latterly via our membership of the EU—through strong alliances with other EU member states, especially France and Germany. We have shared the costs of a system that would be unaffordable by any one country.

Copernicus has been enthusiastically utilised in the public and private sectors across the UK. Its use is growing rapidly, and it is highly diverse. For example, radar data from one of the Sentinel satellites are hugely important in cloudy countries such as the UK because it allows crop and habitat mapping and monitoring where optical data are often limited by clouds. The Copernicus programme is ambitious and wide-ranging. It provides data relevant to air-quality forecasting, flood warnings, early detection of drought and desertification, warnings of severe weather, oil-spill detection and drift, oil-slick predictions, seawater quality, crop analysis, forest monitoring, land-use change and so forth.

Scientists and engineers based at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire have made major contributions to building and testing satellites for the Copernicus programme. The most recent was launched just this month. It will beam back images capable of tracking iceberg movements, illegal logging, and water pollution. The system is also designed to allow real-time monitoring of areas hit by natural disasters.

The current Copernicus programme provides data from four Sentinel satellites of three different types. The fleet will reach an operational state of eight satellites by 2020. Despite the UK’s involvement in building the hardware and its great interest in the programme, it is now unclear what access British teams will have to Copernicus’s observations if the UK loses its status as a full collaborator, which it now has through EU membership.

Before Brexit, UK industry was expected to win contracts for satellite manufacturers and providers of downstream services, valued at €350 million during the current programme and, we hope, adding up to €l billion for the period up to 2027. All such pan-European projects will be in jeopardy, especially if we are not in the single market. So an exit from the Copernicus programme without mitigating measures would be damaging to UK industry and environmental projects—both the satellite construction industry and business operating in downstream services. Our scientific and industrial capacity has grown as a result of these investments and contracts. If the private sector is to continue investing, it needs long-term guarantees of data availability. But, of course—and this is what is most relevant to today’s debate—it threatens the UK’s full participation in a world-leading programme of huge benefit to our environmental and climate policies.

The Copernicus data policy will be reviewed by 2020. Optimists would bank on the current free and open data policy continuing, thereby allowing continuing basic data access to most UK users, but this cannot be taken for granted. Constraints on the data portals and pipelines could render data and some instruments hard to access, or the relevant data may no longer be collected over the UK in the first place. We may, as it were, go to the back of the queue. Even if data access continues, the UK would have less influence over the future evolution of the programme, and lose the ability to tune the satellites or services to our needs. This would inhibit our efforts to manage environmental issues, as well as eroding the benefits from the investments we have already made.

As I have emphasised, UK scientists and politicians have played important parts in developing Copernicus. This is a world-leading project that has given Europe a strong voice in international fora that address how we manage our planet better. This lead will be even more crucial if the Trump Administration carry through their threatened cuts to parallel efforts in the United States. The UK cannot do projects on this scale alone. If we leave the EU, some alliance with our European partners that allows continuing full participation in Copernicus will be needed if we are to foster our own environmental interests, and if our voice is to be heard in global environmental and climatic policy. Therefore, it would be welcome if the Minister could give some assurance that these concerns will be prominent on the radar when negotiations begin.