Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response: International Agreement

John Spellar Excerpts

Monday 17th April 2023 Westminster Hall

[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way, and for highlighting both smallpox and polio. Is the fact of the matter not that it has been a worldwide vaccination programme that has enabled us to achieve that? Does that not demonstrate the falseness of the anti-vax campaigns?

[Nick Fletcher]

I thank the right hon. Member for his contribution. I do believe that the World Health Organisation should be proud of an awful lot of the work that it has done. More recently, the outbreak of covid has brought many questions about the WHO and I would suggest that that is one of the main reasons that we are debating how the WHO can protect our population today.

A question that I believe should always be asked of any organisation is, “How is it funded?” The WHO gets 20% of its funding from member states as assessed contributions, but 80% then comes from voluntary contributions. That is, again, from member states that wish to give more, but also from the private sector and philanthropists.

What can the WHO do at present, and what does the treaty want to achieve? Through international health regulations, the WHO is alerted to potential events, and can then give guidance to members. There is a legally binding agreement that directs nations on what they need to do in a public health crisis. International health regulations were crafted in 1969 and amended in 2005, and they outline each member’s responsibility. However, these are not really legally binding. From what I understand, the WHO has no real power. Members can choose to ignore what the WHO says. It suggests, rather than tells, a country what it should do. It has no real enforcement powers; all it can do is highlight those countries that do not follow guidance.

Through the treaty, it is now proposed that the WHO would be able to police its powers to motivate a country into doing what its officials believe is necessary. Some countries do not want this to happen, and the petitioners do not want the UK to agree to it without a referendum. Why is that the case? The petitioners believe that those sorts of powers should be sovereign. They do not like the fact that WHO officials are unelected. They do not like the fact that some members pay in more money than others, and could therefore have more influence on decisions. They also feel the same about philanthropists and pharmaceutical companies that make contributions.

Are the petitioners over-concerned? In the treaty there is a change of language from “should” to “must”, but is the WHO only doing its job of protecting our population? There appears to be nothing about lockdowns in the treaty, which that is one of the biggest concerns of the petitioners. The next question is what policing member states would look like. It would probably mean sanctions—services or resources being withheld. Would that only affect the smaller countries? Would that really bother the superpowers? Would it really bother the members that are paying in the most money? Each question leads to another.

That leads me to another part of the petition: maybe a referendum is required. I genuinely do not believe in referenda. I was elected to stand here, educate myself on the various topics that come before this House, and make decisions on my constituents’ behalf. It is a position of privilege, and involves a lot of reading, but that is an important part of the position. Our constituents have their own jobs to do, and therefore do not have the time, nor the ease of access to information, that we have in this place.

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[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Sharma. I had intended to make only a few interventions, but when there were initially very few people in the Chamber, I decided to make a brief contribution.

Part of this argument has been about vaccination. We go back to Dr Wakefield and that appalling piece of chicanery that was the supposed impact of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, which has now been completely exposed and discredited. He is now Mr Wakefield and no longer a recognised doctor. Considerable damage was done not just in the UK but across the globe, with large numbers of parents worried about the MMR vaccine and then their children not having it. Suddenly, a disease that had been almost entirely eradicated decades ago—measles—started to spread, with a considerable impact on the health of many children.

We have already discussed how polio has been almost entirely eliminated, and how smallpox appears—one must always be conditional with this—to have been eliminated by vaccination. However, there is the poisonous cesspit of the right-wing conspiracy theorist ecosystem in the United States. I am a huge supporter of our alliance with the US, but within it there is an appalling subculture of those who live by conspiracy theories. The anti-vaccine campaign is one of those, with a detrimental impact on health. That obviously then fed into covid.

We already have international bodies dealing with some issues. With the influenza vaccine, when this year’s variation appears in the southern hemisphere, the international committee then gets together to understand the basic structure, and then informs the vaccine companies in the northern hemisphere. We then all produce that in order to fight it. Very occasionally, the committee gets that wrong, but most of the time it gets it right, which has a huge impact on both the health of individuals and the health service.

This is about international scientific co-operation. The covid vaccine was an exact demonstration of how international co-operation enabled us to produce a vaccine within something like 12 months instead of the normal 10 years. That is a great contribution to health and to stabilising the situation.

There is an argument for referenda on major constitutional issues. For example, it was perfectly right to put the proposal to change the voting system in this country to the public, and the public very sensibly turned that down. By the way, I do not think that anybody should try to change the voting system without a referendum. When the argument about our relationship with the EU could not be resolved here in Parliament, it was perfectly proper to have a referendum, and the people decided on that. We cannot be arguing to have one for every bloomin’ issue, every policy and every treaty. We are signatories to hundreds of treaties around the world.

[Andrew Bridgen]

Has the right hon. Gentleman read the pandemic treaty proposed by the WHO, and has he read the amendments to the international health regulations that have to be looked at alongside that very important document?

[John Spellar]

The request was for a treaty to be drawn up—it has not been finalised yet—under the previous Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson). Is that what we are talking about? This is going into fantasy land. Unfortunately, as we saw during the pandemic, the ability to get coherence across countries, even to move vaccines, is difficult and there is a need to move at speed. This was a covid pandemic, but it could equally have been an avian influenza pandemic. Indeed, there are a huge number of similarities.

[Andrew Bridgen]

The right hon. Gentleman says there is a need to move at speed. Does he agree that Pfizer moved at the speed of science, to the effect that it never even tested whether the vaccine actually stopped transmission or contraction of the virus? This House mandated people to lose their jobs for not taking a vaccine that was unproven and unsafe, and that was actually never going to stop them transmitting the virus.

[John Spellar]

It certainly was not unproven or unsafe, and it had a huge beneficial impact across the world. Unfortunately, we have some people—a very limited number, but we all get letters on this issue—who wallow in the realm of conspiracy theories. Indeed, we have just had another example.

The point I was making is that we sign trade treaties. We signed up to the World Trade Organisation, which binds us to certain forms of arbitration. We have just signed a treaty with Australia as well. All these treaties bring obligations. That is part of engaging with the world, unless we want to be North Korea and have a policy for hermits.

We have also had reference to major pharmaceutical companies. There are criticisms of them in some other areas, but the mobilisation of their intellectual power and production capacity, in producing a vaccine in record time to stem the tide of covid, was absolutely magnificent. So too was the support from one of the great villains of conspiracy theories, Bill Gates, whose foundation has done a huge amount of work in trying to eliminate tropical diseases, which is often little noticed but has a huge impact on tens of millions of people, especially children, in Africa and other areas.

What we are seeing is overreaction and hysteria, and I would argue that we should give the petition a firm rejection, as I am sure we would do if it ever came to the Floor of the House of Commons. We should support international co-operation for international health.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

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[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

Thank you very much indeed, Mr Sharma. I am grateful to be called, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Nick Fletcher) for introducing the debate and all the petitioners who have brought this very important matter to the House. I am pleased to see so many colleagues present, which suggests to me that we should be debating this matter on the Floor of the House. I hope we will do so in due course, as I will explain.

I also thank the organisation UsforThem, which I have been working with on this and other matters. It is the campaign group that led the calls on behalf of children and young people during the lockdowns, and it is now very concerned about what the WHO’s proposal might mean for the most vulnerable people in our society.

I acknowledge the impulse behind the treaty and the proposals that are before the World Health Organisation. I acknowledge that global threats that defy borders require global co-operation, and it is certainly true to say that this country was not sufficiently prepared for the pandemic when it broke out, but I do not believe that the lack of readiness was due to a lack of international co-operation. Indeed, the degree of international co-operation was astonishing. The lack of readiness was in the ordinary business of contingency planning by the British state—the security of supply of equipment, capacity in the health service, and our ability to support the vulnerable and the isolating. That is where we were not ready.

In fact, we could say that in a crucial respect the UK was prepared. We thought that we knew what we would do in the event of a pandemic. We would introduce targeted isolation and targeted protection of the most vulnerable—the application of personal responsibility, not mass lockdowns, which were not part of the plan—but we threw that plan aside immediately, and we went for exactly what everybody else around the world was doing. Or almost everyone—never forget plucky Sweden.

During covid-19, we had an excess of global collaboration and not enough independence—and certainly not enough parliamentary scrutiny. That is why I am concerned about the treaty and what lies beneath it. The treaty would create, via amendments to international health regulations, the infrastructure and funding to implement changes that are being planned anyway. Those amendments are of greater concern. The proposed new regulations would hardwire into international law and our domestic policy a top-down approach to pandemics and global public health. Yes, we need co-operation and strategic vision, but no, we do not need ever more centralised solutions.

In this country, the top-down approach to covid-19, from the centralised test and trace system to food parcels for the isolated, did not work. What worked best was people taking responsibility for themselves and their neighbours, local government working with civil society, medical leaders exercising their judgment, and public servants at the local level working flexibly and with initiative. What worked was not central control but subsidiarity: decisions being taken as close as possible to the people that they affected.

[John Spellar]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right about tracking and tracing people, for which there was already an established infrastructure, but surely vaccines, for example, can be done only at a national and international level.

[Danny Kruger]

I am all for international collaboration, including in the development of vaccines, but no, what we need is more independent development of medical devices and treatments. In fact, it was a race between different countries that led to the vaccine programme. We have a high degree of international collaboration at the medical level, and I am not sure that we need more.

What we now see is the World Health Organisation setting itself up as responsible not just for identifying pandemics but, crucially, for the worldwide responses to those pandemics. The proposed amendments recognise the WHO as the guiding and co-ordinating authority of international responses to public health emergencies of international concern. Of course, we know the WHO’s unaccountable nature: the director general is appointed through an opaque, non-democratic process, and international pharmaceutical companies have too much power.

The regulations propose the creation of a vast public health surveillance mechanism at public expense; if the WHO itself is anything to go by, that would be substantially funded by the pharmaceutical industry. Crucially, as my hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley said, the regulations propose that the WHO’s existing powers to make recommendations about what countries should do be upgraded from non-binding to binding. That amounts to a vast transfer of power to the WHO.

What would the new regulations enable? They would enable legally binding obligations on countries to mandate financial contributions to fund pandemic-response activities. They could require the surrender of intellectual property in technologies. They could mandate the manufacture and international sharing of vaccines. They could override national safety approval processes for vaccines, gene-based therapies, medical devices and diagnostics.