Covid-19: Vaccinations and Global Public Health

Baroness Chalker of Wallasey Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chalker of Wallasey (Con)]

My Lords, as we have heard from previous speakers—particularly the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, in introducing this debate—the shortage of Covid-19 vaccines in the global south is serious but it could be corrected. Many ideas have come forward, but the thing to underline in this debate is that it is a question of different parts of Governments, not just in this country but all over the world, working together with their departments of trade and their technical people to get production in many of the more developed global south countries that could provide vaccines themselves. I will come back to that matter in a moment.

It is 24 years now since my time as an FCO Minister and a development Minister. I have worked with NGOs during that time on the prevention of all sorts of diseases, but in none of them—malaria, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and other preventable diseases, including sight loss through trachoma—have we seen such fast development of a solution to the problem we face. We have seen very fast development by some outstanding companies. That development and that knowledge should be shared across the world, not kept to the more developed countries.

It is imperative that we change our developed-nations storage, as I call it, of vaccines, with 27 million doses in this country, plus the Canadians and others, as has been said. Oxford University reported last month that 32.5% of the world’s population had received at least one dose but that only 1.4% of the population of low-income countries had done so, and most of those are in the global south.

I can accept that higher-income countries hedged their bets in the early months of the Covid-19 infection, but surely there is now a case, when we and other higher-income countries have been successful in administering the vaccine—91 million doses of vaccine have been administered to citizens in the UK alone—for us to stimulate and donate more doses, even beyond the pledges made at the G7 meeting and other meetings.

I note that 54 African countries have received about 31 million doses of vaccine through COVAX, and the G7 is now committed to 870 million doses via COVAX, but the real problem seems to be with intellectual property rights. I have a few key questions for my noble friend on that. They concern the waiving of IP rights, both on vaccine production in low-income countries and on distribution. What has happened to the WTO discussions involving the director-general, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, about developing a text to give developing countries access, where there is expertise, to vaccine production under the guidance of the established vaccine providers? What is being done about getting the supply of the tested vaccines to low-income countries as soon as possible?

Given that before Covid-19 hit there was economic growth in a number of African countries of up to 6%, probably driven by new technology and mobile telephone usage, we know that these countries are capable of taking up the information provided in the more developed countries and those countries lucky to have well-developed industry. Will the Minister undertake to investigate how, by distributing greater supplies of vaccines to low-income countries and by supplying technology training, we can develop the licensed developers in those countries? By doing so, we could increase the vaccination in low-income countries substantially.

It does not take a lot of imagination to see what needs to be done; it simply needs someone to get on with it, and I can think of no one better than my dear friend Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.