Global Vaccine Disparities

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2022 Westminster Hall

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered disparities in the global distribution of vaccines.

I submitted a request for this morning’s debate because I want to draw attention to the grotesque inequalities in the distribution of vaccines to tackle the covid crisis. When we convene for these debates, often it is to seek more information from the Government or to make a request for changes in policy. Now that there will be a change of Prime Minister and potentially a rearrangement of the Government, including of Ministers responsible for this area in particular, this is a particularly opportune moment to place all the issues on the agenda and hopefully see some change. It is also worth using these debates to record one’s position, because when our children and grandchildren look back in decades to come on the Government’s performance, I think they will ask why we did so little to intervene effectively when there was such a huge scale of human suffering across the globe.

The global vaccine story is one of gross inequality. I heard the Prime Minister when he made the statement that it was greed that brought us the vaccine. It was not greed; it was public money. Very significant public resources went into all the vaccines. However, greed was certainly responsible for the obscene inequality that followed.

Over the last year, the richer an economy was, the more likely that country was to have vaccines. At the top end, it would likely have had far more than it needed, and at the bottom of the scale, many countries had almost none at all. Still today, just under 20% of people across the African continent as a whole are fully vaccinated, and only 16% of people in low-income and poor countries are vaccinated. The Prime Minister has talked about vaccine hesitancy being the main factor accounting for that. That is simply untrue. Studies have shown that there is far more vaccine hesitancy in the United States than in most African countries. However, the way that the giant pharmaceutical corporations—big pharma—and richer countries have behaved has certainly fuelled that scepticism, which should worry us all.

The problem is not simply a lack of solidarity or generosity, although that is shocking in itself. As my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill), the shadow Minister for international development, recently uncovered, a year ago the Prime Minister promised to share 100 million surplus vaccines with the world’s poorest countries. That is a very small amount, but at least it is something; yet a year later, barely a third have been delivered.

Those are the doses that we had already bought and were otherwise going spare. They would have been thrown away if they had not been distributed, yet they counted against the aid budget. In fact, it gets worse: we charged the aid budget double what the UK was widely reported to have paid for those doses. The Government had charged around £4.50 per dose versus the £2.30 per dose that they paid, as reported by The British Medical Journal. Yesterday, we discovered that over 1 billion doses are believed to have been wasted around the world. That would have been sufficient to vaccinate everyone in the poorer countries.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the right hon. Member for securing a debate on this issue, which has concerned me as well; indeed, it concerns us all across this House. Is he aware that Eswatini, a little country that borders Mozambique and South Africa and one of our Commonwealth family members, was hit hard by coronavirus? I have to say that whenever I raised this matter with the Government, and with the Minister in particular, they did respond. It is a country that I have a particular interest in because of the churches and the missionary groups there, and the Government deserve our thanks.

Does the right hon. Member agree that one of the difficulties—he has already outlined some of them—is that smaller countries have no one to advocate for them internationally? We need to be more proactive in our responsibilities, first to Commonwealth countries and then to those that have no one to advocate for them. I think he is also saying that we need someone to advocate for them and ensure they get the vaccines that are available. We should be doing that.

[John McDonnell]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention and for his dogged pursuit of the issue in Parliament and with Ministers. There is an issue about the strength of the voices of individual Commonwealth countries, and a real concern about some not being listened to. As a result of that, interventions are not taking place effectively in those countries, but it is invaluable that the hon. Gentleman has consistently raised individual issues with regard to particular countries in which he has an interest through the Christian movement. That adds to the pressure on Government for more effective action, and I am grateful for that.

The situation is worse than just failure to donate at scale. We did not donate as we promised on the scale that we promised, but we also worked to stop others producing the vaccines in their own countries. Around the world, factories offered to produce the vaccines, and one factory in Bangladesh said at the start of the pandemic that it could turn out 600 million doses a year. Compare that to the 35 million doses that the British Government have donated. More than 100 factories around the world could have been safely producing mRNA—messenger ribonucleic acid—vaccines, but were unable to do so because the trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights, or TRIPS, agreement locks that knowledge, which is often publicly produced, behind a wall.

The TRIPS agreement allows huge corporations and their shareholders to profit while preventing us from taking the action that we need to take to protect our own society, as well as people around the world. It is good for the big pharmaceutical companies, and Pfizer predicts $50 billion revenue for its covid vaccine—an anti-viral pill—in 2022 alone. These are the most lucrative drugs in history, and more than one Moderna executive has become a billionaire off its publicly funded and publicly created vaccines, but this situation is bad for us because it has not only created massive inequality, but allowed the virus to go unchecked in many parts of the world, mutating in a way that risks undermining the medicines we already have.