Covid-19: International Response

Baroness Sheehan Excerpts

Monday 18th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sheehan (LD)]

My Lords, I add my thanks to those of other noble Lords to the Minister for initiating this debate. It is indeed crucial that the international dimensions are thoroughly explored when the world is confronted by a crippling disease of global proportions. A disease that knows no borders can be defeated only by a united front of all countries in the world, because no one is safe until everyone is safe.

The breadth of briefings received by me as international development spokesperson from the Liberal Democrat Benches, and other speakers, have reflected four key themes. First is the importance of supporting front-line workers, both to put in place measures to fight Covid-19 and, crucially, to maintain existing programmes to prevent health systems becoming overloaded and unable to serve the most vulnerable who cannot help themselves, including refugees and IDPs. Second is support for the WHO as the world agency best placed to ensure a co-ordinated response and equal access to future vaccines and treatment. Third is the importance of giving Governments a breathing space, with debt relief to strengthen health systems. Last is support for calls for a halt to wars. We have an invisible foe to fight that does not discriminate. We should not fight ourselves.

I start with the importance of supporting front-line NGOs who know their local communities well and are able to rapidly mobilise help to where it is needed, something larger agencies cannot match. It is not a matter of either/or. It is true that the larger UN agencies have unique and important leveraging power to plan logistics and must be equipped to do this. However, where they operate, our UK NGOs have unrivalled knowledge of local structures, and should receive Covid-19-related support commensurate with this level of reach and delivery expertise. It is frustrating beyond belief that these are the very charities battling for survival in the face of falling funding revenue from the public—for obvious reasons—but there is no reason why support from ODA funding should not be forthcoming. A mere £20 million to UK NGOs out of a total of £744 million announced to date to combat Covid-19 is inadequate. The Minister will recall that well over 100 parliamentarians signed a letter from the Lib Dem spokesperson in the Commons to the Secretary of State for DfID, calling for greater funding for UK NGOs. Will the Minister undertake to do all she can to help our highly respected overseas aid charities deliver aid to the poorest communities on the front line of the fight against Covid-19?

It is crucial that the hard work to lay the foundations for delivering the sustainable development goals is not forfeited in misguided decisions to move funding away from the health, education, gender and age equality programmes designed to create more resilient and sustainable economies and societies around the world. As tackling the Ebola crisis showed, preventive healthcare, such as nutrition and immunisation, is particularly at risk during emergencies, first because health services become too stretched to deal with anything non-urgent; and, secondly, because people avoid visiting hospitals and health centres for fear of catching the virus. It is a sad fact that, in the 2019 Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, more than twice as many lives were claimed by the secondary outbreak of measles than by Ebola.

DfID must take steps to ensure that preventive health programmes continue and have safety mechanisms built in to deal with Covid-19 risks, which include ensuring that community health workers have appropriate PPE and are able to implement no-touch techniques, such as using dolls safely to demonstrate to parents how they can screen their children for malnutrition. It must also ensure that the distribution of food, nutrition-related health products and cash is exempt from lockdown restrictions. Is that happening?

Nutrition, immunisation and infectious disease programmes complement one another. Good nutrition is needed to develop a strong immune system and for vaccines to be effective. All three interventions working in tandem lead to better educational outcomes for all, especially girls. Access to education is something that we must heed as this crisis hits harder in the developing world. Sadly, the Tokyo Nutrition for Growth summit, scheduled to take place this year, has now been put back. It was set to follow in the very successful steps of the previous summit, which was hosted by the UK in 2013. Will the Government augment their welcome early commitment to funding for Gavi by doing all they can to push for a virtual Nutrition for Growth summit so that programmes do not risk falling off a cliff edge in 2021? Will DfID play a leadership role and renew its nutrition commitments in 2020?

I shall take this opportunity to highlight the impact of Covid-19 on the efforts to eradicate polio. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative has helped to reduce the number of polio cases by more than 99% since its formation in 1988. We are on the cusp of eradicating polio. However, because of Covid-19, most preventive polio immunisation campaigns and outbreak responses in GPEI-supported countries have been suspended. While the GPEI’s focus on halting the spread of the pandemic is welcome, it is crucial that polio eradication efforts restart stronger than ever. They must include strengthened routine immunisation systems so that progress in eradicating this debilitating disease once and for all can continue. A recent Imperial College article states that if as a global community we are able to maintain

“the most critical prevention activities and healthcare services for HIV, TB and malaria”—

I think polio could be safely included in that list—we

“could significantly reduce the overall impact of the COVID-19 pandemic”,

and therefore lessen the scarring long-term social and economic consequences.

A number of noble Lords have mentioned the WHO, which has come under sustained attack by the President of the United States, and yet it is clear that there is general consensus that it is the global body with the necessary grasp of the measures needed to prevent millions of people dying, to help us return to our own social norms and, in time, to start to rebuild our crippled economies. Let us face it: if the WHO did not exist, we would have to invent it. What the world needs now is visionary leadership, to rally global support for the UN’s $6.7 billion global humanitarian response plan for Covid-19, which the UK co-hosted with the EU.

I ask the Minister: will the UK help ratchet up the response by other countries by committing the UK’s fair share early? I am sure the Minister will point to the £744 million announced by the Government to date to tackle Covid-19, but she will be aware that a large part of that is dedicated to research to find a vaccine and treatments through organisations such as CEPI—the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. But I would be really interested to know what proportion of the £744 million has been dedicated to providing front-line help to the poorest people in the world.

The majority of Covid-19 research and development is publicly funded and, in fact, large amounts of ODA money are being used to finance research. Will the Government give categorical guarantees that UK taxpayers’ money will not fund private profits, and that any treatments and vaccines developed will be accessible and affordable to the NHS as well as to patients in low and middle-income countries? Although it is very welcome that the UK has committed to the WHO’s access to Covid-19 tools accelerator, with its core aim of ensuring equitable global access to vaccines, treatments and tests, the Government still have not set out their plan for how equitable access will be achieved. When will they do so? The idea of a global pool to co-ordinate access and information sharing has already been supported by bodies including the WHO and the European Union, but so far our Government have been silent on the proposal. Will the UK Government move beyond rhetoric on equitable access and look to impose legally binding public-interest conditions on all UK funding committed to developing vaccines and treatments for Covid-19?

With the OBR predicting a large decline in UK GDP this year, there will be a commensurate reduction in the availability of ODA, which is pegged at 0.7% of GNI. Other government departments are spending an increasing amount of ODA on programmes that are not directly delivering relief to the poorest in the world, so does the Minister agree that this position is no longer tenable in the time of Covid and that all effort must be made to rid the planet of Covid-19 as quickly as possible, if only to keep ourselves safe? The diminishing amounts of ODA should be under the sole aegis of DfID, the department best placed to deliver the best value for money for core programmes. The longer it takes to rid ourselves of the virus, the greater the risk that it will mutate into a form that will come back to bite us all even harder. Time to eradicate it is critical.

I finish by asking the Government what they are doing to support the call by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope and the Secretary-General of the UN for a global ceasefire, so that we can give peace a chance and unite in defeating this threat to every country in the world. We desperately need to turn our attention once again to the threat of runaway climate change, which threatens our way of life more permanently.