UK’s vaccine manufacturing facility sold by US firms
Britain is less prepared for a pandemic thanks to the sale of a key vaccine manufacturing plant, leading scientists have warned.
Professor Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute, said that the UK had been going backwards since the coronaviruses epidemic and that the Vaccines Manufacturing and Innovation Centre VMIC in Oxfordshire had been created to respond to outbreaks.
He said that it is less that we haven't learned the lessons and that we are aware of the lessons. We just haven't taken the action required from those lessons. We're looking at our toes again, rather than doing something about it. The 200 million tax-payer funded facility was set up as a not-for profit company, partly due to the 2014 outbreak of Ebola. It was intended to help vaccines from a wide range of technologies into production and quickly increase production during pandemics.
When the coronaviruses struck, the facility was repurposed with a view to mass production, but now the vaccines are being sold to a US company by pharmaceutical companies. This means that the UK is again without a flexible manufacturing facility that can respond to outbreaks. The sale of biotherapeutics helps to strengthen the UK's biotherapeutics, according to the government.
Hill said the loss of control was baffling. The man in the street thinks that the UK is really good at this thanks to all the publicity about what we did during the Pandemic, and probably feels that we are in a good place. We are actually in a worse place than we were three years ago. Professor Robin Shattock, a former chair of the VMIC's board of directors, said he thought the decision to sell had been made on cost grounds. They were worried that they had built this big white elephant and they d be on the hook for the next umpteen years with it ticking over. It probably would have cost 5 million a year if you think of it as defence against infectious diseases rather than military defence. I think the ship has sailed. The government has announced a ten-year partnership with Moderna, the manufacturer of mRNA vaccines.
Professor Sandy Douglas, from the Jenner Institute, said that it is not enough to rely on pharmaceutical companies in the early stages of an outbreak when it is not clear that it will spread. He said that a system would be needed that took action when there is a 10 per cent chance that it is going to be a problem for the UK, rather than waiting for it to be a 99 per cent chance. He said that to combat unknown future threats the UK needed to rely on more than mRNA. He said that everyone was saying never again in 2020. We are back in the position where a pandemic is something that is probably not going to happen in this parliament and so it is off the priority list.
It is not clear whether the UK has a system for thinking about emergency commissioning. Is there a person in government who would say hello, Oxford, we d like you to make a vaccine against this quickly? Kate Bingham, former head of the Vaccines Task Force, said she still hoped that the government would seek an alternative mechanism. The sale of VMIC was a definite loss. She said that she hopes the government listens to these serious concerns and doubles down on advanced biomanufacturing. The chancellor said that the UK's life sciences sector could shape and define this century. We need to re-establish our commitment to working with innovators to scale up and test new vaccines and biotherapeutics that need leadership and funding.