My Lords, I support this amendment. I do not intend to repeat the excellent points that have been made by others because the case in equity—and the case in our own interests—is absolutely compelling in my noble friend’s excellent amendment. However, for a short period of time, I do intend to test just how good the Government’s resistance to this is; I will do so by referring to the Minister’s own speech in Committee on this very amendment. I will ask two questions of the Minister; I hope that he will be able to answer them because, if he cannot, there is no resistance to this amendment.
On 9 February, on the ninth day in Committee, the noble Lord the Minister repeated the Government’s oft-repeated view on this issue when it has been debated in your Lordships’ House that
“the Government remain open to all initiatives that would have a demonstrably positive impact on vaccine production and distribution. However, we believe that waiving intellectual property rights would have the opposite effect. Doing so would dismantle the very framework that helped to develop and produce Covid-19 vaccines at the pace and scale now seen. It would risk undermining the continued innovation in vaccines and technological health products that is required to tackle a virus, especially as it mutates and evolves, so we believe that doing so would be a mistake.”
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Our domestic experience of this is the AstraZeneca vaccine, which was produced with 97% of the funds coming from government or philanthropy and only 3% from investment. Can the Minister therefore say what is the data, other than assertion from pharmaceutical companies, that supports this conclusion that the Government have come to? There must be data to indicate that vaccine waivers have had this detrimental effect; otherwise, the Government are not entitled to come to this conclusion. Try as I might, I have never heard a Minister, when resisting this equitable approach to vaccines, ever explain the data to your Lordships’ House.
I turn to my second question. Later in that same speech, in his fourth paragraph, the Minister said that
“Research contracts afford greater flexibility and more powerful levers than the amendment”,
and went on to say that they can produce
“requirements around access to medicines in the developing world.”—[Official Report, 9/2/22; col. 1704.]
Can the Minister tell the House of any contract that the Government have agreed that has had that result? Has this alternative, which the Government pray in aid, been deployed by them to such an effect that it has significantly bitten into the unbelievably unjustifiable inequity in the share of vaccines around the world?