Global Vaccine Access

Vicky Ford Excerpts

Thursday 13th January 2022 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (Vicky Ford)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Murray. I thank the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) for securing this debate, and I thank the many hon. Members who have contributed to it. I will try to respond to many of the points that have been made.

It is now almost two years since the start of the pandemic. We have seen extraordinary and unprecedented progress in so many areas, but too many people across the world remain unvaccinated and vulnerable to the virus, particularly in lower-income countries and in the most marginalised communities.

[Mr Philip Hollobone in the Chair]

Our G7 and UN Security Council presidencies last year drove an important international response on vaccine access. It included a G7 agreement to share and finance at least 1 billion doses for developing countries by June this year. Furthermore, last month, within days of becoming aware of the omicron variant, we convened G7 Ministers to agree a co-ordinated response. On 30 December, the Foreign Secretary announced £105 million in UK aid to help vulnerable countries respond to the omicron variant, including support to scale up testing, improve access to oxygen and provide communities with hygiene advice.

Last year, we also worked with a wide range of partners to design and fund the COVAX facility, with the participation of over 191 countries and territories, including up to 92 developing countries. Yes, COVAX faced constraints in 2021, but supply has increased rapidly, and the facility has delivered to 86 low and middle-income countries. We were a founder and, with our commitment of £548 million, we were one of the largest donors. The UK continues to support vaccinations through its contribution to the World Bank’s African Vaccine Acquisition Trust scheme. We have also pledged funding for developing covid-19 treatments and rapid diagnostic tests, and we have deployed emergency medical teams.

The UK has also committed to sharing 100 million vaccine doses. We have donated over 30 million doses so far, meeting our goal for 2021, and UK donations have helped to immunise health workers and those most vulnerable to covid-19.

[Wendy Chamberlain]

rose—

[Vicky Ford]

The Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill), asked about the cost of those donations—I suspect that was the intervention that the hon. Member for North East Fife wished to make. The cost of covid-19 vaccine donations for 2021 has been additional to the ODA budget in the 2020 spending review. Our total ODA spend in 2021 will remain within 0.5% of gross national income, given growth forecasts. Departmental ODA budgets are increasing significantly over the period of the next spending review, and they will fully cover the cost of vaccine donations to meet the Prime Minister’s commitment to donate 100 million doses by June 2021.

[Wendy Chamberlain]

Will the Minister give way?

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[Vicky Ford]

I am not going to take interventions right now, because I want to try to answer the points that Members have made in their speeches.

The spokesperson for the Scottish National party, the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford), seemed to believe that the UK holds a stockpile of covid-19 vaccines. That is not the case; the UK does not stockpile covid-19 vaccines. We manage our supply chain very carefully, ensuring that vaccine doses are used and have an impact as quickly as possible, either in the UK or beyond. A number of Members spoke about vaccines that may have gone to developing countries, but were too close to their use-by dates. Right now, vaccines that are delivered by COVAX are delivered in consultation with countries that are ready and able to begin an immediate roll-out, and they are distributed in line with the World Health Organisation’s equitable allocation framework. For bilateral donations, we have sought assurance that recipients have the capacity to roll out that quantity of doses in line with their national vaccination programmes, ahead of their expiry dates.

Supply is increasing, but it needs to be sustained and consistent, so that countries can plan and implement their immunisation campaigns. A capacity to deliver vaccines quickly is now a priority of our focus. A new inter-agency global co-ordinator for delivery has been appointed to focus on in-country delivery, and several countries, such as Mozambique, Rwanda and South Africa, have already administered most of the vaccines they have received so far. Yesterday, I spoke to our team in Ghana, where right now they are vaccinating half a million people every day, and even using drones to deliver vaccines to the hardest-to-reach communities. It is a truly remarkable effort, and we donated over a million vaccines to Ghana before Christmas as part of that work.

Although our vaccine donations make a difference and are a critical source of short-term supply, I recognise that dose sharing alone will not vaccinate the world. That is why the UK also backs the Oxford-AstraZeneca model of voluntary licensing to expand the production of affordable vaccines. About 2.5 billion Oxford-AZ doses have been delivered at cost to more than 170 countries, and about two thirds of those have gone to low-income and lower middle-income countries.

In addition, last year we announced a quarter of a million pounds for the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations in order to accelerate the collaborative development of vaccines against new diseases, including covid-19. CEPI is also providing funding to other UK institutions for the development of vaccines against other diseases, such as Lassa fever, Marburg virus disease and middle east respiratory syndrome. In March this year, the UK will host the global pandemic preparedness summit, which will mobilise resources for CEPI’s five-year strategic goal to reduce the time it takes to develop vaccines against new threats, including new covid variants.

The right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), the hon. Members for Stockport (Navendu Mishra) and for Belfast South (Claire Hanna) and others called for an intellectual property rights waiver, but that is not the solution. There is a serious risk that a TRIPS waiver could undermine the intellectual property framework that helped to produce covid-19 vaccines, and could disincentivise future research and development investment.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Vicky Ford]

I will answer the points that have been made on this, and if I have time, I will give way at the end. The flexibilities within the TRIPS system that were used to tackle the HIV/AIDS crisis are really important. We remain open to all initiatives that will have a demonstrable impact on vaccine production and distribution, and we continue to engage constructively in discussions at the World Trade Organisation to that end. However, we need to focus our efforts on actions that will make timely and substantive differences, such as further voluntary licensing and technology transfer agreements. That is why we support the voluntary licensing approach taken by the team at Oxford University and AstraZeneca. Their collaboration with the Serum Institute of India has massively scaled up manufacturing for global supply.

On manufacturing, we are also providing technical support to develop business cases for Biovac to manufacture vaccines in South Africa, to Institut Pasteur in Dakar, Senegal and to the Moroccan Government. This technical support is helping to catalyse the investment that will see those vaccines produced on the African continent this year. We are also engaging with the new Partnership for African Vaccine Manufacturing. Focusing on supporting manufacturing on the continent of Africa is absolutely one of my key priorities. However, vaccine supply must be matched by the capacity of health systems to deliver them. We have been working to support and strengthen health systems in some of the most vulnerable countries, and we recently launched the “Health Systems Strengthening” position paper, which sets out our determination to do more on building overall capacity. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Theo Clarke) and others point out, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance is really important, and we continue to be a leading supporter. Our commitment of £1.65 billion over five years will help to vaccinate 300 million more children against preventable disease and improve health system resilience against future pandemics.

[Navendu Mishra]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

Order. We do not have time for an intervention, I am afraid. Wendy Chamberlain has to sum up. The Minister will draw her remarks to a close.

[Vicky Ford]

I will. I hope I have answered as many as possible of the questions that have been raised. That is what I have tried to do. The goal to vaccinate the world is monumental, and it is one that the UK is firmly committed to supporting. We have taken global leadership on that, especially during our G7 presidency. The points raised about manufacturing and distribution are live issues that we are tackling now. We will continue to champion the collaborative approach through CEPI, including on producing new vaccines for covid-19.