Britain must build its own vaccine manufacturing capability as a “critical” part of preparing for a future pandemic, the former health secretary Matt Hancock has told the Covid inquiry.
Hancock, a central figure in the UK’s response to the crisis, said the pandemic demonstrated the “vital need” for a sovereign onshore facility to ensure the country was able to produce and distribute vaccine doses as soon as regulators gave the green light.
In evidence to the inquiry on Thursday, Hancock described Britain’s vaccine research as “excellent”, but warned the country was “weak” when it came to facilities able to manufacture doses on the scale they would be needed.
Under questioning from Hugo Keith KC, counsel to the inquiry, Hancock said there was an assumption in the UK that it did not matter where vaccine manufacturing and “fill and finish” – when doses are put into vials and labelled – happened in the world, because in normal times there were no pressures on the system.
But in a pandemic, he said, “the moment a vaccine gets signed off, there’s going to be enormous demand, and geopolitical-level demand for this, and therefore having that manufacture and fill and finish onshore, physically within the UK, is critical in the way that it simply isn’t in normal times”.
Hancock went on to criticise Europe for behaving “extremely badly” over distribution, a reference to a spat that arose between the UK and Brussels over access to the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid vaccine. After Keith warned him that UK-EU relations were beyond the scope of the inquiry, Hancock said it was important to look at, to ensure “we don’t fall into that trap in the future”.
“A whole load of our vaccines were still manufactured on the European continent and that caused us significant problems,” Hancock added.
Writing in his memoir, the former prime minister Boris Johnson said he had considered an “aquatic raid” on a Dutch warehouse to seize doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine after Britain sealed a supply deal with the company.
The latest module of the Covid inquiry, led by Heather Hallett, is looking at vaccines and therapeutics. Both are regarded as rare highlights in Britain’s response to the crisis, given the development of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine and the discovery that a common steroid, dexamethasone, could save hundreds of thousands of lives.
While the UK was the first country to roll out Covid vaccines, the inquiry heard that ethnic minority communities, disabled people, the clinically vulnerable, migrants and Travellers often faced major barriers in getting vaccines, antivirals and other drugs in the pandemic. The difficulties ranged from having insufficient information and a lack of advice in different languages to discrimination and a lack of trust that the vaccines were safe.
The concerns came as Pat McFadden, the chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, announced a pandemic-preparedness exercise to test the UK’s readiness for a future global outbreak. The national exercise, arranged in response to a recommendation from the Covid inquiry, will involve thousands of people across the UK and is expected to run over several days in the autumn.
