The UK has missed key opportunities to prepare for the next pandemic says , the former head of the country鈥檚 Vaccine Taskforce.
The government is no longer steering vaccine research and development to prioritise new technologies that could be strategically vital and has missed chances to maximise manufacturing capacity in the UK, Bingham tells 快猫短视频.
鈥淲e definitely have more capacity now than we used to,鈥� says Bingham. But she still brands the current facilities 鈥渋nadequate鈥�.
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The former 鈥渧accine tsar鈥� makes the criticisms in her new book, . In May 2020, Bingham took an unpaid, seven-month break from her work as a biotech venture capitalist to oversee the fastest possible development and purchase of millions of doses of covid-19 vaccines.
Initially the odds of getting an effective vaccine before most people caught the coronavirus were thought to be low. But the Pfizer/BioNTech covid-19 vaccine was being injected into UK arms by December 2020, with the Oxford/AstraZeneca version arriving the next month. The UK was the first in the world to deliver both these outside of clinical trials and the taskforce had signed contracts for mass supplies as some other countries scrambled for doses.
The fast roll-out of jabs to elderly and vulnerable people as the alpha wave of the coronavirus crashed through the UK in early 2021 saved , according to calculations by Public Health England.
But as well as securing vaccines against covid-19, the taskforce was also charged with building permanent pandemic resilience in the UK. 鈥淲e did not achieve this,鈥� says Bingham in her book.
The UK continues to fund basic medical research that could lead to more potent coronavirus vaccines, or jabs against the next pandemic pathogen, she says. But there is little central oversight or strategic planning, and it can be hard for academics to get funding through the usual mechanisms of government grants, she says. 鈥淭here鈥檚 no coordination. We are losing oversight of the next technologies that we should be thinking about. So it鈥檚 back to where we were before, which is: 鈥榊ou can apply for a grant鈥�.鈥�
The UK does at least have more vaccine manufacturing capacity than before the pandemic 鈥� including at the site of a repurposed . US firm Moderna has also announced plans to start producing vaccine at a large .
But Bingham says it was wrong for the UK to pull out of a deal to buy 100 million doses of covid-19 vaccines from the French firm Valneva last year 鈥� a decision that looked baffling one month later when positive final-stage clinical trial results were announced.
Valneva鈥檚 vaccine works in a different way to the other products used in the UK and the cancellation led to the loss of planned jobs at the firm鈥檚 factory in Scotland. If the deal had gone ahead, it would have diversified the UK鈥檚 vaccine capabilities and been helpful for supply to low-income countries, says Bingham.
She is also concerned about the UK鈥檚 decision to sell the Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre, which helped develop the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab, to the US firm Catalent, as it is unclear if the government has negotiated the right to commandeer the plant for national use in pandemics. The government hasn鈥檛 released details of the contract and declined to answer 快猫短视频鈥檚 questions about it. Nor did it answer other questions about pandemic preparedness.
Another issue for Bingham is a U-turn on plans to make the UK a more appealing place for firms to run clinical trials. In 2020, over half a million people volunteered for coronavirus vaccine trials through an NHS website, with more than a third of the volunteers aged over 60 鈥� a group that is often hard to recruit and yet is most needed.
On signing up, people were asked if they could also be contacted about non-covid trials, with 94 per cent saying yes. But the government-funded (NIHR) has since announced that, as the scheme is widened to other disease areas, everyone must reapply.
A spokesperson for the NIHR says: 鈥淲e are reviewing how to share information about opportunities to take part in a wide range of other health research with everyone on the registry who would like to receive it.鈥�
Bingham says the process of reapplying is too cumbersome and will see the number on the register fall. 鈥淭his is a massive shooting themselves in the foot. They will never create that again,鈥� she says.
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