Covid-19: Vaccination in Developing Countries

Lord Collins of Highbury Excerpts

Thursday 2nd December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

I thank the right reverend Prelate for his question. I do not recognise those particular stats, but I can give him some others which perhaps may reassure him. As I said earlier, the UK is one of the largest donors to the COVAX advance market commitment, which supports access to Covid-19 vaccines for up to 92 low and middle-income countries, 46 of which are in Africa. Our commitment of £548 million will support the COVAX AMC to deliver up to 1.8 billion doses to those countries in early 2022. We have already delivered 16 million doses through COVAX and directly to recipient countries, of which over 6 million have been delivered to 14 countries in Africa. Some 5.8 million doses are with COVAX and are in the process of being allocated and delivered and a further 9 million will be delivered to COVAX in the coming weeks, direct from AstraZeneca. Countries receiving those doses include Kenya, Nigeria and Mozambique.

I apologise for my long answer but, as the right reverend Prelate mentioned, many factors contribute to the slow vaccine rollout and one of those is vaccine hesitancy. I pay tribute to the Church for the extensive work it does on both Covid and other diseases, in particular in Africa, and of course we would be more than happy to meet and talk about this.

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a real north-south issue. On Monday, the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith, told me that the UK did not have a stockpile of vaccine doses and the supply chain is managed carefully to ensure that donated vaccines are able to be used by recipient countries. So, can the Minister explain today why hundreds of thousands of vaccine doses reached their expiry date and have been destroyed rather than distributed to countries that need them? Will he also reflect on what Gordon Brown said: is it true that the UK has 33 million vaccine doses that we could immediately deliver to the rest of the world without impacting our own vaccine programme?

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

I do not know the answer to the noble Lord’s second question. As regards the expiry date issue, decisions on donations are driven by the availability of vaccines from domestic supply. Once the Health Secretary is confident that vaccines are available to donate directly to partners, the Foreign Secretary prioritises how they are shared. Obviously, avoiding vaccine expiry and wastage is a UK core objective, determining when and where we share or deploy doses, and we strive to observe WHO guidelines on that. No vaccines will be shared without an agreement with recipients that there is sufficient time for distribution and deployment before expiry. To expand a little: obviously, it would be much more sensible to manufacture in Africa, and the UK is working with the new Partnership for African Vaccine Manufacturing to develop its road map for African vaccine manufacturing over the next year.