Britain needs a “peacetime vaccine task force” to prepare for the next pandemic, ministers have been warned amid concerns that the government could forget the lessons of Covid-19.
The Commons science and technology committee has also called for the government to appoint a chief vaccines officer to help prepare the country for future threats.
In a letter sent this week, Baroness Brown of Cambridge, chair of the committee, said evidence to an inquiry held by the committee raised “troubling concerns about our capacity to manufacture vaccines for future biological threats”.
The warning comes after the government announced it has bought more than 5 million doses of bird flu vaccines to help battle a potential future pandemic. This follows an increase in transmission of the virus among animals.
The committee said its interest in vaccine development in the UK was prompted by “a series of worrying developments”, including the sale of the Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre (VMIC) in Oxfordshire, and the later mothballing of the facility.
It also cited 11 reports that a planned reduction in state aid threatened AstraZeneca’s proposed vaccine manufacturing facility in Liverpool.
Giving evidence in January, Dr Clive Dix, former chair of the vaccine taskforce, said the Conservative government had “destroyed almost everything that was going on” in favour of reliance on Moderna. He said there was less resilience in the UK now because many manufacturers had walked away from the UK.
The committee’s letter added: “Our witnesses raised concerns that “other countries have learned the lessons … from where we are sitting, it appears that government and the public have concluded that the UK can do this and that we do not need to improve our systems”, comparing it unfavourably to the more pro-active EU response discussed below.”
It added: “The UK needs to ensure it retains robust vaccine manufacturing and scale-up capacity for the next pandemic, but it is falling behind other countries. Witnesses argued that the UK was fortunate to be able to produce a vaccine at speed in 2020 and should not assume this will be possible in the future without renewed and sustained support, and that this relative success may have led to some complacency compared to countries that have funded vaccine manufacturing more urgently.”
Earlier this year the government announced a new partnership with pharma giant Moderna to trial a new norovirus vaccine.