Covid-19: Vaccinations and Global Public Health

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, for securing this debate and his excellent introduction, and I have enjoyed the uniformly excellent contributions to it.

It is worth going back a step and thinking about the nature of the world in which the Covid-19 virus arrived. This is a world of massive, almost unenvisionable inequality. Rich countries have drained $1.52 trillion from the global south since 1960, according to a calculation from the anthropologist, Jason Hickel. I refer to his paper in New Political Economy, which looked at the unequal exchange in the post-colonial era, the rate of which increased dramatically in the neoliberal structural adjustment period imposed on the global south, taking us to the point where Covid arrived. The global north was drawing from the south $2.2 trillion each year through unequal pricing, which is a reflection of unequal power. That has been calculated as being enough to end extreme poverty in the world 15 times over, or it could pay for far more Covid vaccines than we actually need.

At the same time, we have seen destruction of natural worlds and the dumping of plastics and toxic wastes on those nations. We have an economic system—a power imbalance—which sees multinational companies having far more power than entire nations, or even groups of nations.

Then we come to what is happening with Covid vaccines. Here I am particularly pleased to be following the noble Baroness, Lady Chalker of Wallasey, and to pick up on her point about how we are not taking the knowledge of the world and sharing it with the world. Currently, the cost of vaccinating the world is five times what it should be if pharmaceutical companies were not profiteering by charging five times as much as it costs to produce vaccines. These calculations are made by the People’s Vaccine Alliance, which includes the African Alliance, Oxfam and UNAIDS. Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna have been charging Governments as much as $41 billion above the estimated cost of production of vaccines. To bring this to a national level, Colombia is estimated to have paid $375 million more than the cost price of the vaccines that it has been able to purchase. They are making vaccines for $1.20 a dose; COVAX is paying on average five times that.

There is a huge moral argument here, which many noble Lords have made, for why this should not be allowed to continue, but I know that there are some people in politics who do not acknowledge moral arguments so I shall look briefly at the economic arguments. The economic cost to rich countries of not supplying vaccines could exceed their cost by 10 to 100 times. Essentially, we are shooting ourselves in the foot economically. The noble Lord, Lord Oates, spoke about the impact on economies in the global south, but the damage there will have huge impacts on our economies as well.

Of course, as many noble Lords have noted, no one is safe until everyone is safe. One million new infections occur in the world every day right now.

I have some expertise in the area of biology so I will venture for a second into what that means. Uncontrolled transmission of the virus is what drives mutations of it. Each infection in an individual person produces millions of viruses. Most of those viruses will be identical to the infecting virus dose but some will be mutations. There is then a bottleneck, where that person transmits a small dose of virus from what they have to others. Individually, cases will almost certainly be the same as the original virus, but in some cases they will transmit the mutations. The more infections you have, the more get transmitted.

I will finish by looking at some figures. The New York Times has a very handy table for the number of doses per 100 of population. Here are some rates. In Congo there are 0.1 doses of vaccine per 100 people; in Haiti, 0.4; in Papua New Guinea, 1.5; and in the UK, 138.