Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response: International Agreement

Debate between Marco Longhi and Danny Kruger

Monday 17th April 2023 Westminster Hall

[Danny Kruger]

I am all for international collaboration, including in the development of vaccines, but no, what we need is more independent development of medical devices and treatments. In fact, it was a race between different countries that led to the vaccine programme. We have a high degree of international collaboration at the medical level, and I am not sure that we need more.

What we now see is the World Health Organisation setting itself up as responsible not just for identifying pandemics but, crucially, for the worldwide responses to those pandemics. The proposed amendments recognise the WHO as the guiding and co-ordinating authority of international responses to public health emergencies of international concern. Of course, we know the WHO’s unaccountable nature: the director general is appointed through an opaque, non-democratic process, and international pharmaceutical companies have too much power.

The regulations propose the creation of a vast public health surveillance mechanism at public expense; if the WHO itself is anything to go by, that would be substantially funded by the pharmaceutical industry. Crucially, as my hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley said, the regulations propose that the WHO’s existing powers to make recommendations about what countries should do be upgraded from non-binding to binding. That amounts to a vast transfer of power to the WHO.

What would the new regulations enable? They would enable legally binding obligations on countries to mandate financial contributions to fund pandemic-response activities. They could require the surrender of intellectual property in technologies. They could mandate the manufacture and international sharing of vaccines. They could override national safety approval processes for vaccines, gene-based therapies, medical devices and diagnostics.

[Marco Longhi (Dudley North) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the ability to react to covid in an agile way, which was possible only with our having exited the European Union, enabled us to invest in, procure and then roll out the vaccine that saved millions of lives? As he has stated in his—as usual—eminently sensible speech, that should be a model for moving forward.

[Danny Kruger]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. It is certainly the case that the best aspects of the British Government’s response were those that we were able to undertake using our own sovereignty.

The WHO’s powers will potentially extend to ordering countries to close borders; to travel restrictions; to the tracing of contacts; to refusal of entry; to forced quarantining; to medical examinations, including requirements for proof of vaccination; and even to the forced medication of individuals. It is not just when a pandemic has already been declared that those powers might be invoked: the WHO claims these powers when there is simply the potential for such an emergency.