Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, how much Official Development Assistance is spent annually by the Government on advancing vaccine manufacturing capabilities in low and middle-income countries.

The UK is one of the biggest global donors on COVID-19, and has pledged over £1 billion of UK aid to counter the health, humanitarian, and economic risks of the pandemic. To support global access to vaccines, we fund international organisations in delivering an 'end to end' approach to developing new vaccines, treatments, and tests, from research, development, and clinical trials through to supporting manufacturing scale-up and delivery. We report aid spend using standard Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Development Assistance Committee codes, which do not track how much aid is spent on vaccine manufacturing specifically.

Building vaccine manufacturing capacity is a long-term, capital intensive, and high-risk endeavour. The UK is providing technical assistance to catalyse private sector and development finance investment into vaccine manufacturing in Africa, the region with the least manufacturing capacity globally. This includes engaging with the International Finance Corporation (IFC) to support business case development for their $4 billion Global Health Platform to support manufacturing of health essentials such as therapeutics, diagnostics, and vaccines.