Covid-19: Vaccine Production Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
Lord Purvis of Tweed
Main Page: Lord Purvis of Tweed (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Purvis of Tweed's debates with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
Covid-19: Vaccine Production
Lord Purvis of Tweed Excerpts(2 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Callanan (Con)
I thank my noble friend for his comments and he makes a very good point, the same point that I made earlier. Production of these vaccines is technically complicated, particularly the mRNA vaccines. There are not really any other production facilities outside the West in the property of big pharmaceutical companies that are able to produce them. It is not a question of simply waiving the IP rights and allowing anybody to produce them.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
My Lords, paragraph 10 of the G7 communiqué refers to 700 million doses being made available from domestic productions, over half of which have gone to other G7 countries. Uganda, for example, is paying three times as much as the EU and the UK for the AstraZeneca vaccine because of the limit and because it is not using the WHO Technology Access Pool. Will the Government think again and open up access to technology and know-how in order to allow other countries to increase domestic production, so that they pay the same to AstraZeneca as the UK is paying?