Covid-19: Vaccinations and Global Public Health

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Boateng on securing time for a discussion of one of the most urgent life and death issues in the world today. As someone who advised him in government on pro-human rights and equality measures over 20 years ago, it is a particular privilege to support him today, as it is to speak in the same debate as my noble friend Lady Lawrence of Clarendon, with whom I have campaigned for so many vital causes over the years.

In my too short time I should like to focus on the immorality and self-destructive illogic of the Government’s current opposition to the vaccine patent TRIPS waiver. To be clear, and to be clear on the record, I believe that the inevitable national and international inquiries, like future generations, will be very harsh judges of this.

Of course, the waiver is, as we have heard, promoted by South Africa and India and supported by half of our Commonwealth, including Pakistan and now Australia. It is advocated by the WHO, the Pope and the United States, with—it would seem—only Germany and the United Kingdom in embarrassing resistance. Forthcoming elections in Germany might even alter the German position.

In answer to a question in your Lordships’ House on 21 July, the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, said:

“It is our strong view that this Government support intellectual property, because it is only through our commitment to intellectual property that we can encourage the kind of massive investment by the private sector … in the first place. For that reason, we remain hesitant about supporting a TRIPS waiver policy.”—[Official Report, 21/07/21; col. 250.]


As a human rights lawyer, I believe in intellectual property as well, but, given that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine was 97% publicly funded, and that it is a similar story for Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech in the US and Germany, it seems to me that there is a very strong argument that there should have been government-owned patents, or indeed creative commons, in the first place.

Furthermore, like so many of our fundamental freedoms, property is a qualified right at the best of times, and proportionate interference is even more justified in the exceptional circumstances of a pandemic. Ordinary people, businesses and nations have made extraordinary sacrifices of their liberties, livelihoods and lives over the last 18 months—so why weep hot tears for a temporary reduction in the profits of pharmaceutical giants that would only make them more popular and trusted in the future, as a result?

Another argument that is sometimes made against the waiver is that countries in the global south are somehow incapable of safe generics production. It is as if we are advocating a sort of “Breaking Bad” solution, with people mixing vaccines in their basements. That is an insult that verges on the racist. As the noble Baroness, Lady Chalker, suggested, with proper support, know-how sharing and regulation, there is substantial capacity. Indeed, the Serum Institute of India was producing vaccines for export to the West while the bodies of Covid-19 casualties were floating down the Ganges. During that same Indian peak, Teva offered in vain to help with the vaccine effort, and, if we had engaged the TRIPS waiver then, that Israeli company could have begun production to help, as it wanted to do.

Not to share vaccine recipes and know-how free of charge during a deadly pandemic is as obscene as it would be for one of us in your Lordships’ House right now to restrict or charge for advice on emergency exits from this building in the event of a raging fire. While I congratulate the professionals and volunteers of our wonderful NHS on our domestic vaccine rollout—indeed, I encourage anyone and everyone offered to take up their jabs—it is a luxury to be deliberating child vaccinations and booster shots when less than 2% of people in low-income countries have received a single dose. If we want to trade and travel, while protecting ourselves from endless mutations and variants, this vaccine apartheid is positively self-harming, and it must end.