The UK is “going backwards” when it come to pandemic preparedness, the former chair of the Vaccines Taskforce has suggested.
Dame Kate Bingham said the nation is “not in a much better place to deal with a new pandemic” while European countries are increasing their capabilities to face new viruses or new variants of Covid-19. She suggested that UK capabilities set up to tackle the Covid-19 crisis were being “dismantled” and called for expert oversight to ensure the nation was prepared for future threats.
“What’s going wrong is there has been no expert or leader that’s put in place to coordinate the activities,” she told a joint hearing of the Science and Technology Committee and Health Committee of MPs. “People that understand manufacturing scale up, clinical development, regulation… all of that has gone. We’ve got the capability in the country, but it can’t be done in a vacuum, we need to have an expert leader to bring that together to try and get us back into a better position.”
