Post by Nadica (She/Her) on Oct 15, 2024 0:15:08 GMT
Britain ‘falling behind’ on vaccines, says team behind Covid jab - Published Oct 14, 2024
It's funny: The BBC version of this story is entitled "New Covid Jab Campaign off to Good Start" or something like that. This is why you always read multiple sources.
By Tom Whipple
The scientists who put the UK at the forefront of vaccine development during the pandemic say complacency has set in and call for a new ‘peacetime taskforce’
The UK has gone from the front of the pack to the back in its ability to manufacture a pandemic vaccine, the team behind Oxford Covid jab have warned.
Giving evidence to the House of Lords, scientists involved in the design and manufacture of the vaccine said that the UK needed a “peacetime” version of the vaccines taskforce, which led the procurement of vaccines during the pandemic. Currently, they said, we were less well-prepared than we were in 2019.
Professor Sandy Douglas, from Oxford’s Jenner Institute, said that having successfully made a vaccine in 2020, it felt like the country was now complacent.
“If we look around the world, other countries have learnt the lesson. In early 2020 we were …somewhat ahead of the rest of the world. It appears from where we are sitting that maybe the government and public have concluded that the UK can do this and we don’t need to improve our systems.”
Criticising the decision to sell off the Vaccines Manufacturing and Innovation Centre, a pre-Covid organisation intended to maintain an ability to respond to emerging pathogens, he and his colleagues said Britain needed to emulate other countries and have a dedicated manufacturing capacity “kept warm” to make vaccines when needed.
“Other countries around the world, notably the EU, have looked and thought, ‘Well, maybe things didn’t go so well. What preparations can we put in place?’”
The EU in particular, he said, had invested heavily in its ability to scale up vaccine production, ensuring it has contracts in place that could rapidly divert manufacturing. “They really could tomorrow press go and make a batch of our vaccine more quickly than we could do it in the UK. And the UK has absolutely nothing comparable.”
In particular, he told the Lord’s Science and Technology Committee, the EU had invested in a range of technologies — whereas the UK’s main post-Covid contract was with Moderna, which specialises just in mRNA vaccines.
Douglas said he had been unable to establish details of what that contract involved, and what it obliged them to do during an outbreak. He appeared alongside Professor Catherine Green, who made the first batches of the Oxford vaccine for human trials, and Dr Adam Ritchie, senior vaccinologist at Oxford’s Jenner Institute.
Green said that there would always be uses for dedicated vaccine capacity. “We see pandemic threats emerging all the time. There’s an ongoing Marburg outbreak in Rwanda currently, and Oxford has responded to that. We had a vaccine in early phase, and we will be getting manufacturing done through a different route, but not in the UK.”
Marburg is a tropical virus, with a high fatality rate, that has long concerned scientists — although it is considered a low risk for a pandemic. Green said that it was a good example, though, where any pandemic investments could find applications rather than staying mothballed.
“If we had a capacity to keep things warm, there would be vaccines we could make for emergency scenarios. The money wouldn’t be wasted if we had a peacetime vaccine task force. You would keep them warm by making useful things that would go out into the world and have useful effects. So we know what we should do, but we don’t currently do that in the UK.”
Ritchie said that what was needed was an organisation that could help bridge academia, small-scale production and big pharma. “In 2020, we were as a country at the front of the queue in many ways. Now, I’m not sure we’re not right near the back of it … there are big programmes to improve manufacturing capacity in almost every other part of the world at the moment. But there’s very, very little here that would allow us to pivot quickly.”
Douglas said that many people did not realise how precarious the underpinnings of our initial response was, in particular Green’s manufacturing facility that enabled the first small scale trials.
“We’ve never had strategic funding … There have been points in the last decade where one individual leaving their post could have led to the facility falling over.” He said that during the early stages of the pandemic they were having to decide whether to stop projects that were paid for to work on Covid, which wasn’t, and that sometimes this held them up. “For want of really very small amounts of money, meaningful time was lost.”
This had also affected their onward negotiations with manufacturers that could bring it to a larger scale. “We were having phone calls every week and we were saying, ‘Oh, next week there’ll be some money. Please don’t give away the capacity to somebody else’.”
Ritchie said that it was also crucial that these projects were funded knowing that, often, they were likely to fail.
“We often had conversations about what if it doesn’t work? And the upshot was we will do the best science we can do. And we will do it as quickly as we can to the highest possible standard. And we will trust our colleagues in London and overseas to do exactly the same. And between all of us, something will work. But you don’t know it’s going to be your one.”
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said: “The partnership with Moderna will strengthen the UK’s vaccine research infrastructure through mRNA research and development.
“Together with the UK Health Security Agency, the government is ensuring the country is prepared and ready to respond to any current and future health threats.”
It's funny: The BBC version of this story is entitled "New Covid Jab Campaign off to Good Start" or something like that. This is why you always read multiple sources.
By Tom Whipple
The scientists who put the UK at the forefront of vaccine development during the pandemic say complacency has set in and call for a new ‘peacetime taskforce’
The UK has gone from the front of the pack to the back in its ability to manufacture a pandemic vaccine, the team behind Oxford Covid jab have warned.
Giving evidence to the House of Lords, scientists involved in the design and manufacture of the vaccine said that the UK needed a “peacetime” version of the vaccines taskforce, which led the procurement of vaccines during the pandemic. Currently, they said, we were less well-prepared than we were in 2019.
Professor Sandy Douglas, from Oxford’s Jenner Institute, said that having successfully made a vaccine in 2020, it felt like the country was now complacent.
“If we look around the world, other countries have learnt the lesson. In early 2020 we were …somewhat ahead of the rest of the world. It appears from where we are sitting that maybe the government and public have concluded that the UK can do this and we don’t need to improve our systems.”
Criticising the decision to sell off the Vaccines Manufacturing and Innovation Centre, a pre-Covid organisation intended to maintain an ability to respond to emerging pathogens, he and his colleagues said Britain needed to emulate other countries and have a dedicated manufacturing capacity “kept warm” to make vaccines when needed.
“Other countries around the world, notably the EU, have looked and thought, ‘Well, maybe things didn’t go so well. What preparations can we put in place?’”
The EU in particular, he said, had invested heavily in its ability to scale up vaccine production, ensuring it has contracts in place that could rapidly divert manufacturing. “They really could tomorrow press go and make a batch of our vaccine more quickly than we could do it in the UK. And the UK has absolutely nothing comparable.”
In particular, he told the Lord’s Science and Technology Committee, the EU had invested in a range of technologies — whereas the UK’s main post-Covid contract was with Moderna, which specialises just in mRNA vaccines.
Douglas said he had been unable to establish details of what that contract involved, and what it obliged them to do during an outbreak. He appeared alongside Professor Catherine Green, who made the first batches of the Oxford vaccine for human trials, and Dr Adam Ritchie, senior vaccinologist at Oxford’s Jenner Institute.
Green said that there would always be uses for dedicated vaccine capacity. “We see pandemic threats emerging all the time. There’s an ongoing Marburg outbreak in Rwanda currently, and Oxford has responded to that. We had a vaccine in early phase, and we will be getting manufacturing done through a different route, but not in the UK.”
Marburg is a tropical virus, with a high fatality rate, that has long concerned scientists — although it is considered a low risk for a pandemic. Green said that it was a good example, though, where any pandemic investments could find applications rather than staying mothballed.
“If we had a capacity to keep things warm, there would be vaccines we could make for emergency scenarios. The money wouldn’t be wasted if we had a peacetime vaccine task force. You would keep them warm by making useful things that would go out into the world and have useful effects. So we know what we should do, but we don’t currently do that in the UK.”
Ritchie said that what was needed was an organisation that could help bridge academia, small-scale production and big pharma. “In 2020, we were as a country at the front of the queue in many ways. Now, I’m not sure we’re not right near the back of it … there are big programmes to improve manufacturing capacity in almost every other part of the world at the moment. But there’s very, very little here that would allow us to pivot quickly.”
Douglas said that many people did not realise how precarious the underpinnings of our initial response was, in particular Green’s manufacturing facility that enabled the first small scale trials.
“We’ve never had strategic funding … There have been points in the last decade where one individual leaving their post could have led to the facility falling over.” He said that during the early stages of the pandemic they were having to decide whether to stop projects that were paid for to work on Covid, which wasn’t, and that sometimes this held them up. “For want of really very small amounts of money, meaningful time was lost.”
This had also affected their onward negotiations with manufacturers that could bring it to a larger scale. “We were having phone calls every week and we were saying, ‘Oh, next week there’ll be some money. Please don’t give away the capacity to somebody else’.”
Ritchie said that it was also crucial that these projects were funded knowing that, often, they were likely to fail.
“We often had conversations about what if it doesn’t work? And the upshot was we will do the best science we can do. And we will do it as quickly as we can to the highest possible standard. And we will trust our colleagues in London and overseas to do exactly the same. And between all of us, something will work. But you don’t know it’s going to be your one.”
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said: “The partnership with Moderna will strengthen the UK’s vaccine research infrastructure through mRNA research and development.
“Together with the UK Health Security Agency, the government is ensuring the country is prepared and ready to respond to any current and future health threats.”