Britain is less prepared for a pandemic than before the Covid crisis after pushing out jab manufacturers and relying on a limited number of shots, according to the country’s former vaccines chief.
Dr. Clive Dix, chairman of the UK’s vaccine taskforce, told MPs on Wednesday that there had been “a complete collapse” of work to ensure Britain was better equipped with vaccines for the next pandemic, noting that all activity ” had literally disappeared”.
The vaccine taskforce is widely regarded as a rare highlight in the UK’s Covid response. It was led by venture capitalist Kate Bingham and Dix, who took over as chairman 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 had given ministers a series of “strong recommendations” to ensure Britain was better prepared for the next pandemic, but these were not adopted or published. “There were activities already underway that were stopped,” he added.
Another major concern, Dix said, was Britain’s reliance on mRNA vaccines, the approach behind Pfizer and Moderna’s Covid shots, to tackle future outbreaks. “That’s really scary,” he said during the hearing. “The mRNA vaccines are not the most important thing. 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 activates the immune system.
As well as failing to invest in a range of vaccine technologies, Britain also drove out vaccine manufacturers by treating them so poorly, Dix added, leaving the country in an even worse position than before Covid.
“What we have seen is a whole list of incompetent decisions,” Dix told MPs. “We have less resilience now because many manufacturers have walked away from Britain because of the poor treatment they received at the tail end of the vaccine task force.”
He raised the case of Valneva, a French company that shut down a vaccine factory it had built in Scotland after the government canceled the contract during the final phase of clinical trials. Former Health Secretary Sajid Javid told Britain about scrapping the deal would not have approved the vaccinebut the drug regulator approved the shot. Dix called the comments “incompetence at the highest level.”
A statement read to MPs at the University of Oxford’s Pandemic Sciences Institute reflected concerns about a lack of resilience, noting that Britain was unprepared for the recent MPox outbreak and “remains unprepared for an outbreak of bird flu ”.
Professor Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, who gave evidence alongside Dix, said the danger lay in preparing for a future pandemic exactly like Covid. Although the Covid vaccines took almost a year to develop, they built on years of crucial research into coronaviruses. Work on dozens of other potential pandemic pathogens lagged far behind, he said.
“To me, we are really unsafe right now from future pandemic threats because we just don’t have the knowledge that you need to even trigger the weapon like we did in 2020,” he said. “And even then it took eleven months before there was a vaccine.”