Vaccine Health Technology Assessment

Lord Rennard Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Rennard (LD)]

My Lords, some weeks ago, the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie of Downpatrick, tabled a Written Question on this subject. With great respect to the Minister, her response was not a strong one: it merely suggested the possibility of considerations such as productivity costs being highlighted by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, so we are all grateful to the noble Baroness for securing this debate and enabling us to take up the issue further.

I believe that considerations such as impact on productivity and the wider economy should always be included at the heart of decision-making concerning the provision of medicines and vaccines, but there is a general problem in public policy-making, with too much short-termism and insufficient weight being applied to factors beyond simple clinical outcomes. I often argue in the House that productivity, which was discussed in the Chamber yesterday, as well as wider socio-economic considerations, should be applied more generally to decisions about procurement in the healthcare sector. We need to consider these issues in relation to the provision of assistive technology supporting people with disabilities and we need to apply them to the provision of medical equipment, such as continuous glucose monitors and insulin pumps for people with diabetes.

In many public policy areas—not just healthcare—we need real, long-term cultural change. We need much less short-termism and much less policy development based on silos that exclude the consideration of wider relevant issues. Long-term benefit analysis concerning vaccinations must cover not just costs to the NHS against improving life expectancy but the benefits of a healthier workforce, of more people paying into HMRC and of fewer people with illnesses and disabilities being more dependent on the DWP. We should also look much more at the considerable potential benefits of greater emotional well-being to both people and society as a whole.

However, first, we must think ourselves lucky to live in the United Kingdom and not in the United States, where a dangerous, ignorant and prejudiced man was appointed by President Trump to undermine sensible public health policies with his anti-vax agenda. Millions of people worldwide are at risk because of his prejudices, which contradict the scientific evidence. I hope that the Minister will assure us that the Government are doing everything they can to prevent right-wing nutters in this country—many of whom are influenced by the far right in America—spreading dangerous disinformation here about the safety and necessity of vaccination programmes. Everyone should know that vaccinations prevent millions of deaths every year from diseases such as measles, rubella, polio, flu and Covid-19. We need to educate people from an early age against the prejudice of ideologies that are hostile to vaccinations.

We also need to look carefully at the current evaluation process for new medicines and vaccines, led by NICE and the JCVI, which is built on something that is too narrow and is termed the “health sector perspective”. This approach is about managing the immediate budgets of the NHS, but it is not about the budgets of the NHS in decades to come. This approach does not look at the economic consequences of inaction. Recent research from the Office of Health Economics suggests that respiratory infections alone cost UK businesses an estimated £44 billion annually in lost productivity. This is a drain on our national prosperity; productivity should be a key factor in considering the evaluation and rolling out of vaccines.

Last year, I got my flu jab. As a person with diabetes, I also got my Covid-19 jab on the NHS. However, this year, I was told that I no longer qualified for the Covid-19 jab. I had to pay £90 to have it privately, but not everyone can do that. Failing to vaccinate as widely as we should for flu and Covid-19 costs money in many ways. I understand that the prevalence of flu this year has been very damaging to the public sector and that many people will be badly affected by this. We also need to consider the impact of vaccination programmes on educational attainment. For childhood vaccines, the current models of evaluation often miss the long-term benefits of improved school attendance and cognitive performance, which eventually translate into higher lifetime productivity.

We need to look more at the benefits of vaccines that can make other life-saving treatments, such as chemotherapy for the immunocompromised, safer and more effective. We need to be more aware of antimicrobial resistance, or AMR. Vaccines are front-line defences in this battle, reducing the need for antibiotics and thus slowing the development of resistant strains. Although the JCVI acknowledges this, it does not yet consistently capture the value in its cost-effectiveness models.

The Government’s 10-year health plan and Life Sciences Sector Plan set an ambitious target: for the UK to be one of the top three fastest places in Europe for patient access to medicines by 2030. I know that there will always be pressure within government to prioritise measures that show benefit by the time of the next election. There is always intense pressure from the Treasury to consider the implications for immediate budgets and, as we know, whichever party wins the election, the Treasury stays in power. I believe that, to establish better practice, we should look more to nations such as Sweden, which already incorporates a broader range of studied impacts, including productivity losses for both patients and carers, in its assessments. I hope that the Minister can respond positively.