International Vaccine Programmes: Funding

Question

15:09:00

Asked by

To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to maintain funding for international vaccine programmes, such as GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance.

My Lords, the UK has long been a strong supporter of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. We have committed £1.65 billion to the current strategy covering 2021-25, and we have provided over £5 billion since 2000. This has enabled Gavi to vaccinate over 1 billion children and save 18 million lives. The outcomes of the spending review are being used to inform how the official development assistance budget will be used. The Foreign Secretary and I look forward to attending Gavi’s replenishment summit on 25 June.

My Lords, often what we categorise only as aid is also a form of national security spending. In the case of biosecurity, this is reinforced by the fact that the national risk register identifies pandemics as the greatest risk we face in the UK today, and the strategic defence review identifies engineering biology and new pathogens as a clear and present risk. Against that backdrop and the United States’ proposed defunding of Gavi, would my noble friend the Minister agree that renewing our support for Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, would not only be a form of philanthropy but a pragmatic investment in our national security?

My noble friend put that incredibly well. This is about security. I would not call it philanthropy; I would call it a partnership with countries that benefit from the ability of Gavi to vaccinate at scale and with value for money. I point out that countries do not just stay as a recipient of Gavi vaccines but progress to become donors to Gavi—look at India and Indonesia—such is the success of this approach.

My Lords, I very much appreciate the Answer that the Minister has given, but does she agree with me that there is far too much satisfaction shown by financial spokesmen on the reduction in overseas aid, given that the certain outcome is more illness and more death, particularly among women and small children?

I am not sure which financial spokespeople the noble Lord is speaking about. On behalf of the Government, I can say that the decision to reduce our ODA spend was taken in order to invest more in defence. That is a decision I support; it was the right decision to take at that particular point in time. It is our hope that, in time, as the economy improves, we can increase our spending. We understand the long-term benefits of enabling countries to develop and to become safe and more secure, more prosperous and able to stand on their own two feet. This is what countries are telling us repeatedly. They want to be partners with us and move on from simply being recipients of aid.

My Lords, I appreciate that the Minister is facing some really tough decisions about where the substantial cuts to international development will fall, and I hope she will look favourably on Gavi for the reasons she has set out. On the cuts more broadly, is the Minister able to say when the details of the cuts will be published following last week’s spending review?

I thank the noble Baroness for the question and acknowledge her work in international development over many years. She has remained a stalwart advocate for the benefits of development ever since, and I thank her for that. We will be publishing the more detailed decisions that we are currently taking shortly. We will be consulting over the summer with partners, stakeholders and countries, to make sure that we are getting this as right as we can in, as she says, the constrained financial circumstances that we are in.

Further to the question of the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, we know that any reduction in vaccine availability has a massively disproportionate impact on girls and young women. In the light of the recent government announcements of cuts and the deprioritisation of gender, as the Minister stated to the IDC in the Commons, the Government were challenged by the charity community to demonstrate how they were meeting their obligations under statutory equalities tests. The Government replied last week, and I can inform the House that they said that the tests do not apply because those impacted are not UK citizens. Can the Minister please assure me and the rest of this House that, when it comes to vaccine availability for children, a child in need of a vaccine in Malawi is just as needy as a child in Manchester, and that equalities are universal for this Government and do not end at the channel?

I think the noble Lord is somewhat overinterpreting what has been said. We have been very clear that we are going to prioritise humanitarian, health and climate initiatives. Because of his work in this field, he will understand that, when you are talking about health, principally, the beneficiaries are, quite rightly, often women and children. We will be making sure that a child, wherever they live, can access what they need. Gavi is a very good way of delivering this. We will be making our decisions, doing the impact assessments and, unlike the previous Government, publishing the conclusions of the impact assessments, because we want to be as transparent as possible.

My Lords, are the Government aware that we have a serious vaccine crisis in this country? It started with Covid. There is a lot of disinformation. Measles, mumps, rubella and a number of other vaccines are vital. We are well below the safety thresholds in many parts of the UK. Can the Minister give some indication of what the Government are doing to reverse these trends?

I would be straying somewhat beyond my remit to talk about vaccine hesitancy in the UK, but I point out that pathogens do not respect barriers. It is in the interests of health security in this country to make sure that having children vaccinated becomes the norm, wherever those children are growing up.

My Lords, nearly every minute a child dies from malaria somewhere in the world. That death toll is easily remedied by the application of vaccination—vaccines which we have partially produced in the UK in our industries, research institutes and academia, and which have been partially subsidised in their application to the populations of need by Gavi. Apart from that huge humanitarian gain, have His Majesty’s Government estimated the positive economic impact that a successful Gavi replenishment, which is due very shortly, can have on the investment in and growth of our biomedical and pharmaceutical industries?

That is a very important point. On the economics of this, we know that for every £1 invested through Gavi there is a return of around £54 through lives saved and fulfilling lives lived. As far as the UK is concerned, the noble Lord is right to remind us that we are leaders in devising vaccines and vaccine manufacture. Without a doubt, there is going to be a benefit from supporting Gavi further to GSK and others here in the UK. That is good, and it is important that we support that work, but the principal aim of this must always be health security and supporting developing countries in making sure their populations are vaccinated, for their good and everybody else’s, and that they can use that partnership to develop and support their own vaccination programmes in time.

My Lords, I think there is widespread agreement across the House on these programmes. To be fair, as the Minister pointed out in her initial Answer, the previous Government committed £1.65 billion between 2021-25, supporting Gavi to immunise some 300 million children and save up to 18 million lives from vaccine-preventable diseases. This is a vital programme. I understand that the Minister cannot give specific numbers at this stage, but perhaps she could set out the general role that the Government should play in global vaccine equity.

The noble Lord is right; I am not going to give a number this afternoon, because the replenishment is taking place next week. I will be attending, alongside the Foreign Secretary, and we will be making the announcement he talks about. I pay tribute to the previous Government for investing in and supporting Gavi. I am proud that it was started under a Labour Government and continued by successive Conservative Governments. We will continue to support it too, because it is such a successful initiative.

My Lords, the success of Gavi, which I have seen for myself as a former ambassador for Gavi in both Ghana and Tanzania, has been based on partnership with local health ministries and with the workforces in those countries. That partnership is strained by the recruitment by our National Health Service of doctors and clinicians from Nigeria and Ghana and throughout the Commonwealth. That is undermining the health service delivery in those countries. If we are going to continue to recruit from those countries, will the Government please give some consideration to making direct budgetary funding available to the health departments in the countries of which Gavi is a part?

We work very closely with our partner Governments. We should respect the fact that they need not only vaccination partnerships but a sustainable workforce strategy themselves in order to deliver the healthcare that they require. We will continue to work closely with them. I know that the Health Secretary has his eye on this issue as well. I have every confidence that, across government, working in partnership with my colleagues at the Department of Health, we will be able to proceed in a way that my noble friend would support.