Covid-19

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:35 pm on 25 May 2021.

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Photo of Nadhim Zahawi Nadhim Zahawi Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy), The Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Health and Social Care 12:35, 25 May 2021

That is a really important question. Let me share with the hon. Member a little about the operational challenges around vaccine manufacture. We will of course look at any text that our US colleagues put forward on the intellectual property issue, but in reality if the exam question is to get more jabs in the arms of those who live in low and middle-income countries, the bottleneck is not the IP but the transfer of technology to manufacturers around the world. What Oxford-AstraZeneca has done incredibly well is to transfer that technology to 20 sites that can manufacture at scale. We have already delivered 450 million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. The hon. Gentleman might recall that Pfizer did the same thing; it actually paused its manufacturing in Europe and expanded it, to go from 1.2 billion doses a year for 2021 to almost 3 billion doses. If the exam question is to get more jabs in arms, we need that technology transfer. It is not easy, as we saw in Halix in Europe, which had great difficulty operationalising the manufacturing, as did Catalent in the US. That is the real effort that needs to go in—as well, of course, as helping other countries with deployment. It is only one part of the jigsaw to get the vaccine into warehouses in those countries; those countries have to be able to get it out and into people’s arms.