Select committee: Foreign Affairs Committee
Recommendation 10
Fifth Report - Global Health, Global Britain
Published 30 Sep 2021
Paragraph 30
Addressed to Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office
Foreign Affairs Committee Global health security All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Recommendation (the committee's words)
To defeat covid-19, and tackle future pandemics, a wider range of countries need the ability to produce vaccines. The production of AstraZeneca by India’s Serum Institute offers a good model for technology transfer to build this capacity. Many national leaders have backed the call for a temporary waiver on intellectual property for covid-19 vaccines. We recommend that the Government pursues a wide range of means to bring about greater manufacturing capacity in lower-income countries, including through expanded technology transfer schemes. In its response to this report, the Government should set out the steps it is taking to transfer vaccine technology to low- and middle-income countries, and its goals in terms of increasing global vaccine production.
From: Foreign Affairs Committee, Fifth Report - Global Health, Global Britain (HC 200), paragraph 30, 30 September 2021
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 16 December 2021 (deadline 30 November 2021).
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government sets out action across the Committee's recommendations, supporting a pandemic treaty and WHO reform while saying it is "yet to see evidence" for a single, non-renewable term for the WHO Director-General.
- On WHO funding, it says it has led calls in the WHO working group for more flexible, reliable funding and for an increase in Assessed Contributions, and it announced a £340m, four-year flexible funding programme that is "now live".
- On vaccines, it says it will "donate a total of 100 million doses by June 2022", with 80% of doses going through COVAX.
- On the BBC World Service, it states that the BBC is editorially independent, so additional services to tackle disinformation are "for the BBC World Service to decide". It cites an £8 million uplift for 2021-22, of which £3 million was for disinformation.
- On aid cuts, it describes the reduction to 0.5% of GNI as temporary, saying it will return to 0.7% "when the fiscal situation allows". It will publish a Health Systems Strengthening Position Paper before the end of the year, with decisions on publishing a global health strategic framework "in due course".