The WHO’s naive global vaccine plan won’t withstand contact with reality
World Health Organization logo near its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland,
The AstraZeneca vaccine was, for a while, the most celebrated product in Britain. The UK was one of only a handful of countries with the skills and apparatus not just to invent an effective Covid jab but to administer it at speed.
A vaccine taskforce saw the Army, NHS and Civil Service combine to make Britain a world leader in the rollout. Its co-inventor, Sarah Gilbert, was given a standing ovation at Wimbledon. But the wonderjab was withdrawn this week amid mutterings that it had been overhyped all along.
It’s certainly true that Britain’s vaccine triumph did not release us from lockdown. But that’s because Boris Johnson failed to seize the moment, deterred by Sage’s now-notorious doom graphs. Lockdown may turn out to have been a dud policy launched on a false premise, but the vaccines worked and were just as safe as we were promised.
It’s also true that AstraZeneca struggled with the omicron variant, but for earlier waves it cut death risk by 80 per cent. Its rapid development and rollout saved countless lives.
Learning the right lessons from the vaccine rollout is important because the World Health Organisation (WHO) is trying to assert global governance for next time, where countries promise not to stockpile jabs and give away a fifth of their supplies.
Britain looks likely to opt out, and rightly so. It would be impossible to justify politically. The AstraZeneca experience proved that we can make our own quickly, and protect our most vulnerable. It also showed there’s no case for a Fortress Britain: it was the German-American jabs which, in the end, worked best.
The first duty of any country is to its people, a point the WHO misses in suggesting that rich countries sign some kind of global pact. The virus showed how it’s hard to rely on global suppliers. When panic sets in, each country has a tendency to look out for its own.
At one stage, France and Germany banned PPE equipment being sent to Switzerland. Britain agreed decent contracts and priority delivery of Pfizer from a Belgian factory, which at one stage Emmanuel Macron was talking about impounding. He didn’t, but the drama showed people’s instincts.
The Americans didn’t even think about exporting Pfizer until their own people had been protected: as you’d expect. It’s naive to expect any country to really behave differently. But we did see that Pfizer and others were generous with sharing information and with making it under licence.
The lesson is that countries should invest in vaccine-making (and distributing) capability for next time. But to donate it in a crisis? The WHO’s 42-page draft treaty will not find many signatures for that.
One big problem was the deeply politicised nature of all of the debate. As AstraZeneca was rolled out, rare issues with blood clots emerged – as this newspaper was the first to report. But when they did, an official from the MHRA – the UK’s medicines regulator – phoned up in a rage to say that, if the coverage did not soften, the Daily Telegraph would be banned from future press briefings, even from receiving press releases.
The blood clot issue was serious enough to have AstraZeneca phased out for British under-40s here and removed entirely from Denmark, Canada and some other countries.
Another political problem was the disastrous idea of vaccine passports. When it became clear that the Covid vaccines did protect the individual but weren’t so good at stopping the spread, the logic for these passports collapsed. But ministers were not very honest about this, and the idea rumbled on after its scientific justification had vanished.
This was soft coercion: changing vaccines from something you get because you want the protection, to something that you get because the authorities will make your life difficult if you don’t.
Vaccines should have been positioned as a life-saver, with officials welcoming all questions – no matter how tricky. But the vaccine passport idea brought a hint of menace, as did the plan to fire any NHS workers who did not take the jab.
Britain now looks more vaccine hesitant, as a country, than before, with childhood jabs dropping to a worrying level. Just 50 per cent of frontline NHS workers took the flu jab in the winter before last, the lowest uptake in a decade.
The WHO’s remit is global and the obvious role for it to play now is in highlighting the calamitous effects that lockdowns had on the world’s poor. Shutting down economies is bad enough for rich countries, but furlough was dished out to help people cope. There was no such help for those who were indirectly affected.
The United Nations has claimed that 50 million people in Africa “fell into extreme poverty as a result of Covid”. The WHO could point out that this was as a result of lockdowns, not Covid: the effects of the drawbridge-up mentality that decimated global trade. And perhaps took more lives in the third world than the virus.
The effects of lockdowns on normal vaccinations and healthcare in the developing world will take some time to become clear. If the WHO could count the damage and draw lessons for next time, the advice – if followed – could perhaps save as many lives as the vaccines.
But even now, there’s a reluctance among global poverty campaigners to talk about the lives lost as a result not of the virus but of avoidable mistakes.
The WHO is right to say that there are lessons to be learnt. The main one is that, in a pandemic, countries panic. A bunker mentality becomes inevitable.
When Macron moved to block vaccines being exported from the European Union, he said he was declaring the “end of naivety”. The naivety, in this case, is a belief that contracts and laws would be honoured when political leaders can’t get enough of the vaccines they need. This is likely to happen the next time, no matter what the WHO asks world leaders to agree now.
But if the WHO were to produce a comprehensive and globally-read report on the result of lockdowns, it could perhaps push for something more viable: to ensure that, next time, the death toll inflicted by a pandemic is not multiplied by a botched response.
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