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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is a science commentator
Four years ago this week, the World Health Organization declared the rapid spread of a new coronavirus to be a pandemic. No corner of the globe was left untouched by the disease, which has so far sickened at least 770mn and claimed more than 7mn lives.
The UK pulled out all the stops in the race to a vaccine, thanks in part to existing research into coronaviruses; in December 2020, it became the first country to roll out a mass vaccination programme. But, according to the leader of that effort, some of the valuable lessons learnt during the crisis risk being lost.
Kate Bingham, a healthcare investor and former chair of the independent Vaccine Taskforce, told the BBC this week that some of the group’s guiding principles, such as bringing industry expertise into government, had since fallen away. While it was encouraging to see the government continuing to back mRNA vaccines through a pact with Moderna, she said, it had pulled out of deals with other companies offering different vaccine platforms. Latching on to mRNA as a pandemic cure-all was “a bit like saying we’ve discovered cruise missiles and that is now our solution for all potential defence deterrents, when actually you may need short-range missiles”.
She is right in her assertion that future pandemics are best managed by holding a diverse portfolio of prototype vaccines for multiple pathogens — and that pandemic preparedness is not taken as seriously as military readiness. Even amid the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the threat from disease remains ever-present and unpredictable. Bird flu has reached penguins in Antarctica and the WHO is currently revising its list of potential pandemic pathogens. Despite talk of Covid as a once-in-a-century event, there is no law of pandemics that says the next Covid-level crisis, or worse, cannot happen in our lifetime.
Bingham, though well-connected, observed that she is no longer in government and might be missing part of the picture. To be fair, vaccines have not fallen off the radar: as well as the government’s 10-year partnership with Moderna, AstraZeneca pledged last week to invest £650mn across its Liverpool and Cambridge sites, focusing on vaccine research, development and manufacturing. The government has also signed an advance purchase agreement with CSL Seqirus to supply vaccines in a flu pandemic. The UK Health Security Agency, meanwhile, has absorbed some of the defunct task force’s remit; happily, ministers support the G7 ambition of being able to produce a vaccine within 100 days of sequencing a pathogen.
The anniversary, though, offers the chance to ask if the UK is paying a sufficiently broad insurance premium. Possibly not. While Moderna and AstraZeneca specialise in mRNA and viral vector vaccines respectively, there are other vaccine types that were once thought worth pursuing but since dropped. During the pandemic, the government signed, and then cancelled, a deal with France-based company Valneva to make whole-virus inactivated Covid vaccines.
This approach uses a deadened form of the whole virus, rather than just a chunk. Whereas some Covid vaccines modelled solely on the spike protein required updating against the Omicron variant (such as Moderna’s), whole-virus vaccines are thought to be more durable. The Valneva cancellation cost the taxpayer close to £360mn and led to a manufacturing plant being mothballed. Last year, the government asked Novavax, another non-mRNA vaccine maker, to pay back $112mn shelled out for vaccines that it later did not want. It also sold off the Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre, billed as a key piece of preparedness infrastructure, in 2022. Consistency matters.
Darius Hughes, UK general manager of Moderna, agrees with Bingham that “the government has got to put its [pandemic preparedness] eggs in more than one basket” but points out it is betting on more than just mRNA. Factors beyond vaccine type also matter, he adds: surveillance, speed of clinical trials and manufacturing.
With the NHS and a strong life sciences sector, the UK could become a global vaccine superpower. That ambition, the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry says, is contingent on “[making] sure we do not forget the lessons we learned during the pandemic”. Those include retaining close working partnerships between industry, academia, the NHS and government.
Four years after a global pandemic was declared, we all want to forget and move on. Given we don’t know when the next crisis will hit, it feels more prudent to remember — and to be in a position to move quickly.
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