Covid-19 Inquiry

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare interests as the former shadow Attorney-General who attended cross-party briefings with Ministers and officials in early 2020 and as a member of your Lordships’ Committee inquiring into the operation of statutory inquiries in general.

The work of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hallett, and her team is to be commended for its ambition and delivery so far. The module report currently before your Lordships’ House deals with UK pandemic resilience and preparedness, which, on the evidence before it, the inquiry found significantly wanting. Its findings and recommendations in this respect are clear, compelling and, in my opinion, rather difficult to quibble with—but of course quibbles none the less come. From my own recollection, meetings in January 2020 revealed significant gaps in both preparedness and even nimble thinking. A question I remember posing about the possible need for rationing and temporary requisitioning of vital medicines, equipment and large vacant premises was met more than once with embarrassed silence.

However, this report also foreshadows other modules to follow, all of which must to some extent be interconnected. In the hope that the inquiry team will watch or at least read today’s debate with interest, and with the aim of advocating towards areas of vital detailed inquiry still to be pursued, it is on as yet unexplored areas of pandemic handling that I intend to focus my remarks. I am especially concerned with the modules dealing with vaccines and therapeutics and with the UK’s economic response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Once more, these are distinct discussions but with crucial overlap.

By way of introduction, it has long been my view that the pandemic was both a genuinely global tragedy justifying urgent and continuing international—rather than purely national, let alone, as we have heard, nationalistic—responses and a parable for every inequality and hypocrisy in our own nations and the wider world.

Here at home, health and other vital public service workers and volunteers displayed nothing short of heroism in our communities, risking their own lives—sometimes dressed in bin liners for meagre protection—to help others, even before a full understanding of the virus, let alone the advent of life-saving vaccines. They were akin to the unknown soldiers of the Great War. Some—including from minority ethnic and international communities—literally sacrificed their lives for others. By contrast, we saw some people panic-buying essential goods, corporate profiteering, corrupt firing and rehiring of staff in some service industries, so-called VIP lanes for public procurement, and a government inability or reluctance to tackle fraud in relation to Covid business support loans. That prompted the dramatic resignation of the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, from that Dispatch Box in your Lordships’ House in January 2022.

Ordinary people and small businesses gave up precious liberties, livelihoods and lives during chilling but none the less proportionate lockdowns, yet there was often an asymmetry to lockdown enforcement and support. In the public mind this will perhaps be for ever symbolised by infamous parties at No. 10 and breaches of social distancing implicating not one but two former Prime Ministers, while the elderly died, grieved alone, or were tipped out of hospitals untested, often into unsafe care homes.

However, such inequities became even more distastefully graphic and counterproductive on the international stage, where deaths reached 7 million. Crucially, when critical vaccines arrived, as a result of large-scale public and philanthropic investment, normal rules on intellectual property were not promptly and temporarily waived to allow them to be shared at scale and at genuine production costs with millions of people in the global South. It was as if big pharma refused to share the floor-plan locating emergency exits in a burning building, even though Governments, charities and altruistic scientists had collaborated to build those fire escapes in the first place.

Of course, in a pandemic, even more than in a fire, hoarding lucrative but life-saving knowledge is counter- productive to public health, as the spread of a virus and its mutations anywhere risks new infections and re-infections everywhere. Dead bodies floated down the sacred Ganges river, while subcontracted Indian manufacturers provided vaccines to be sent to the global North. If ever there was a justification for human rights principles to be applied more directly and effectively to international institutions and corporations, it was this.

Many leading voices at the WHO, in the Vatican and in the White House—at least, after President Biden took office—called for an activation of the TRIPS waiver for vaccine patents at the WTO. Gordon Brown was a leading UK proponent of this emergency measure, with so much support in the global South, where vaccination continued to be beyond the reach of too many. Shamefully, the UK Government were one of those who stubbornly blocked the measure in the interests of corporate profit. Some noble Lords opposite elegantly stonewalled on this question month after month as the death toll soared.

By way of context, after 9/11, the US faced a threat of anthrax, after samples were sent to key politicians. The US needed drugs to treat this disease but could not get supplies quickly enough, so it threatened the supplier, Bayer, with a compulsory licence, to allow the US to mass-produce the drug or obtain generic versions to treat people with anthrax. During Covid, Israel issued a compulsory licence to secure supplies of early drugs thought to be active, and Spain also changed laws to allow compulsory licensing.

There are understandable and proportionate precedents. If states believe that they are in a health emergency situation, just as they may demand social distancing and home-working for individuals and small businesses, they may issue compulsory licences in the face of corporate non-co-operation and greed. But how much more effective would it be to do this collectively at the international level, as proposed?

Unsurprisingly, and in response to the Covid-19 experience, there is currently legislation pending in the European Parliament in relation to EU-wide emergency compulsory licensing. Unlike the last Government, our new Government are internationalist in outlook and pro-human rights in their values. Will they learn lessons from the bitter fruit of nationalism, whether in racist public disorder on our streets or the disproportionate loss of life in health crises?

There are currently remarkable new drugs, such as lenacapavir, which prevents HIV infections. There are currently 1.3 million of these new infections in the world every year. The drug is sold in high-income countries for $40,000 per patient per year, despite a potential annual production cost of just $40. Without voluntary or compulsory licensing, this drug will be beyond the reach of millions of people in low and middle-income countries, meaning many unnecessary infections and deaths, with no hope of ending the epidemic. Often the poorest countries get better deals than middle-income ones, which are frequently left out of voluntary licence agreements. Further, the general problem of drug and vaccine inequity is surely a huge issue for pandemic prevention and response, now and in the future.

It is a marvel of human resilience that so many people have adjusted to life after the Covid-19 pandemic as if it were but a bad dream. However, we know that for a great many others its ramifications will be felt for decades to come. In some ways, it is not unlike a world war in the scale of the existential threat that was posed and its human and economic costs. After World War II, statesmen across the political aisle and around the world came together to try to prevent reoccurrence by way of shared values and a machinery for co-operation. May we not do that again?