Medicines and Medical Devices Bill

Debate between Lord Sharkey and Baroness Barker

Committee stage & Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 28th October 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Sharkey (LD) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Stunell. As my noble friend Lady Sheehan so clearly and compellingly explained on Monday, this amendment deals with the key question of access to medicines and is particularly relevant as we find ourselves swept along by wave 2 of the global pandemic. It is clear that, at least initially and perhaps for much longer, supply of any Covid-19 vaccines will fall behind demand. This raises the urgent question of who should receive priority access to these vaccines. Who should get them first, here and internationally? How should equitable access be decided?

The Government appear to be adopting two contrasting approaches to this question. On the one hand, we have Gavin Williamson saying:

“It’s the right thing to be doing to be at the absolute front of the queue to make sure we’re in a position to get those vaccines first when they become available”—


and that does seem to be what we are doing. As of August, the United Kingdom was the world’s highest per caput buyer, as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, mentioned on Monday. The vaccine taskforce has placed orders for six unproven vaccines, taking its potential stockpile to 340 million doses. Of course, we do not yet know to what extent, if at all, these vaccines might work, so some duplication is obviously prudent. But on the other hand, and while securing our place at the front of the queue as Mr Williamson recommends, we are also involved in trying to work out, under the auspices of the WHO, an equitable access scheme. The rationale for that is pretty obvious. Unless we have such a scheme, rich countries will end up vaccinated well in front of poor countries. In the face of a global pandemic, that approach carries obvious risk. It also carries moral risk.

The Government have committed £60 million to the WHO COVAX facility—the Covid-19 Vaccine Global Access Facility mentioned by my noble friend Lady Sheehan on Monday. COVAX seeks to enable global collaboration and equitable access to vaccines. It views this model of pooled procurement as preferable to rich countries doing bilateral deals. We have also joined 150 countries in expressing an interest in participating in COVAX for our own vaccine purchases. But there is clearly a risk that the bilateral purchasing of vaccines by the United Kingdom and other rich nations could undermine the work of COVAX. Could I ask the Minister how we balance our Williamson approach with our COVAX approach? How are these approaches prioritised? How much should we try to secure for ourselves and how much should we share? What criteria will be used to decide what access means in practice? We know something of what people in the UK think about the issue. Some 96% of the UK public supported the idea that national Governments should work together to ensure that treatments and vaccines can be manufactured in as many countries as possible and distributed globally to everyone who needs them.

My noble friend’s amendment also raises the issue of Crown use licences. We have previously used or threatened to use these licences in our negotiations with pharma. Can the Government confirm their willingness to use these licences if price negotiations on Covid-19 vaccines fail to reach a satisfactory conclusion?

I urge the Minister to give very serious consideration to the issues raised by this amendment. I will listen to his reply with great interest.

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

I thank my noble friend Lady Sheehan for her introduction to this amendment and the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for the detail that he added to that.

My interest in this matter stems back to 2013, when I was part of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on HIV and AIDS, which produced a report called Access Denied. It was about barriers to access to antiretroviral drugs for HIV and AIDS in low and middle-income countries. In the course of our research work for that report, we held a number of hearings with all sorts of representatives from a number of international research groups based in the United Kingdom but which worked across Africa and Asia. We met user and patient groups and also included representatives from the pharmaceutical companies.

I vividly remember sitting in a room in Portcullis House during one of our question and answer sessions and putting a question to a representative of a pharmaceutical company that has cropped up in our discussions in the last couple of days. I asked him a simple question—whether there was a direct correlation between the R&D costs of a drug and the price. With disarming candour, he said, “No”. Once people’s jaws had ceased to drop, we had the revelation that actually there is no transparency about pricing in the pharmaceutical industry or about the extent to which public and private funding goes into the development of new medicines—and, in effect, an admission that the overstatement by pharmaceutical companies of the need to charge excessive prices in some markets to maintain their viability is not substantiated.

I am not an anti-pharma campaigner. I believe that human and animal welfare rests very much on the development of pharmaceutical knowledge and science, and I am all in favour of extension of research and development of new drugs. However, for far too long Governments of all sorts have been held over a barrel by pharmaceutical companies, and that should stop.

I say this as someone who has had a long-standing interest in HIV. To see some patient groups in some parts of the world continue to become infected and, perhaps, have threats to their lives that would not occur if they had simply been born in another country is devastating. For example, in the world of HIV, very little work is being done on development of antiretroviral drugs for paediatrics because there is very little call for that in western developed nations, whereas there is a very big need for it in sub-Saharan Africa. Our involvement in these matters has a direct bearing on the lives of people across the world and on our standing not only as one of the major governmental funders through the different international funds but as a country in which research into new and emerging transmissible diseases is second to none because of our long-standing history.

For all those reasons, I very much support my noble friend Lady Sheehan, and I await with interest the answer to the question that my noble friend Lord Stunell put, which was the one I was going to ask, about proposed new paragraph (d) in my noble friend’s amendment.