UK falling behind in ability to tackle future pandemics

Britain's former coronavirus vaccines tsar has accused the government of "dismantling" the systems she put in place to defend the country against future pandemics.

- ANDREW WOODCOCK

Dame Kate Bingham warned that the UK has "lost its leadership" on vaccine research and development, manufacturing and procurement, and is now trailing behind the European Union in preparedness.

She also warned that the government's plan to join the Pacific-area CPTPP trade bloc could be "catastrophic" for UK vaccine production because it would involve signing up to a different intellectual property regime from the EU. In her role as head of the Vaccines Taskforce, Dame Kate was credited with ensuring that Britain was the first country in the world to start inoculating its citizens against Covid-19 in December 2020.

But yesterday she told the House of Commons health and science committees: "What's gone wrong is there's been no expert or leader put in place to coordinate the activities. Everything from vaccine innovation scale-up to landscaping figuring out where the new variants may come from, the new potential pandemic viruses - people that understand manufacturing, scaling up clinical development, regulation. All of that has gone. Maybe there's someone secret out there that is doing that, but not as far as I can see."

She told the panel of MPs: "We need to improve the quality of the vaccines - the durability, the ability to stop transmission, lots of things need to be improved. That's not going to happen in a vacuum, and that's where we need to bring together the capabilities that we have got, working in partnership as we did effectively in 2020, to actually make sure we stay ahead of the game and are not constantly looking in the rearview mirror."