Covid-19 Update

Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick Excerpts

Tuesday 8th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to my noble friend for his advocacy on behalf of Nepal; we are all extremely moved by the stories from Nepal and the challenge that it has had from Covid. We are extremely supportive of his initiative for both medical supplies and the vaccine but, as I said, there is a sequencing challenge here. Our priority as a Government is the British people. It is important that we see the job through. As the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, pointed out, there is a threshold to which we need to get the British public to ensure that the R rate remains below one and that the new India variant, or any other variant, does not run amok and drive up hospitalisation in the UK. Until we have reached that point, we must focus on the job at hand. In the meantime, and in parallel, we are doing absolutely everything we can to grow global manufacture of the vaccine and ensure that countries such as Nepal receive secure and reliable supply. My noble friend should be reassured that we are absolutely firm in that commitment.

[Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, we have often heard it said that we will not all be safe until the whole world is safe. Today, UNICEF, the children’s charity, is lobbying the G7 Ministers, asking for an ongoing distribution of vaccines to poor and developing countries, rather than supplying surplus vaccines at the end of our programme, because they may not be able to use them in the best possible way at that stage. Will the Minister, further to the answers he has already given, go back to his ministerial colleagues and the Prime Minister and urge them to please undertake that global vaccination programme, along with other G7 countries, now? The WHO said yesterday that inequitable vaccination is a threat to all nations.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

I completely endorse the sentiments of the noble Baroness and can absolutely reassure her that this is top of the agenda for the G7 leaders’ meeting later this week. The Prime Minister will absolutely be ramming home the message that she put extremely well. Roughly 1 billion vaccinations have been done around the world so far; that leaves another 7 billion or 8 billion to do. We need manufacturing on a scale that the world simply does not have today to see that job through. That is why the UK has contributed so much through the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is a wonderful, portable, cheap and flexible platform for creating vaccines for the world. We are ensuring that that magic source is available to all those who can contribute vaccine manufacturing capacity anywhere in the world. In the meantime, we will ensure that any capacity that we have after we have done the British public is made available, but we have to see the job through here in the UK. It would be utterly counterproductive if the UK, having got so far, tripped over at the last hurdle.