The UK is less prepared for a pandemic than it was before the Covid crisis after driving away jab manufacturers and relying on a narrow range of shots, according to the country’s former vaccine chief.
Dr Clive Dix, who chaired the UK’s vaccine taskforce, told MPs on Wednesday there had been “a complete demise” of work to ensure the UK was better equipped with vaccines for the next pandemic, noting that all the activities were “literally gone”.
The vaccine taskforce is widely regarded as a rare highlight in Britain’s Covid response. It was led by the venture capitalist Kate Bingham and Dix, who took over as chair in December 2020, when Britain became the first country to roll out Covid jabs.
Speaking to the Commons science, innovation and technology committee, Dix said he and Bingham gave ministers a set of “strong recommendations” to make sure Britain was better prepared when the next pandemic hit, but these were not adopted or published. “[There were] activities already going on that were stopped,” he added.
Another big concern, Dix said, was the UK’s reliance on mRNA vaccines, the approach behind the Pfizer and Moderna Covid shots, to tackle future outbreaks. “That’s really scary,” he told the hearing. “The mRNA vaccines are not the be-all and end-all. They will only work if we know what the virus is and know the antigen,” he said, referring to the part of the virus that triggers the immune system.
Beyond failing to invest in a range of vaccine technologies, the UK also drove vaccine manufacturers away by treating them so poorly, Dix added, leaving the country in an even worse position than before Covid.
“What we’ve seen is a whole list of incompetent decisions,” Dix told MPs. “We have less resilience now because a lot of the manufacturers have walked away from the UK because of how badly they were treated at the tail end of the vaccine taskforce.”
He raised the case of Valneva, a French firm that mothballed a vaccine facility it had built in Scotland after the government cancelled its contract during final stage clinical trials. On scrapping the deal, former health secretary Sajid Javid said the UK would not have approved the vaccine, but the medicines regulator duly approved the shot. Dix called the comments “incompetence at the highest level”.
A statement read to the MPs from the Pandemic Sciences Institute at Oxford University echoed concerns about a lack of resilience, noting that Britain was not prepared for the recent mpox outbreak and “remains unprepared for an avian influenza outbreak”.
Prof Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, who gave evidence alongside Dix, said the danger was in preparing for a future pandemic exactly like Covid. While Covid vaccines took nearly a year to develop, they built on years of crucial research on coronaviruses. Work on dozens of other potential pandemic pathogens lagged far behind, he said.
“For me, we are really unsafe at this moment for future pandemic threats because we just don’t have that knowledge base that you need to even start the gun as we did in 2020,” he said. “And even then it took 11 months to have a vaccine.”
