Humanitarian crises monitoring: impact of coronavirus (interim findings) Contents

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5Global health

97.At the virtual UN General Assembly for 2020, the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, made one of the closing speeches which he used to chide his fellow heads of government for the fractious way he saw the international community dealing with the coronavirus pandemic.

98.The PM made a number of announcements of relevance to the UK’s contribution to the global response to the impact of the coronavirus on developing countries.

• He stressed that, despite the common global challenge, and the need for a coordinated global solution, the pandemic had been very divisive in terms of the international community
• There was a practical need to reach a joint understanding of how the pandemic began, and how it was able to spread, to prevent a recurrence
• The UK would be upping its contribution to the W.H.O. by 30% to £340 million over the next four year period.
• The UK was already the biggest single donor to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness (CEPI) programme to find a coronavirus vaccine, just as it is the biggest donor to global vaccine alliance, Gavi, and,
• ‘because no-one is safe until everyone is safe’, the UK would be contributing up to £571 million to COVAX, the WHO-led initiative to guarantee provision of, and access to, coronavirus vaccines across the world (£500 million of the UK contribution will be explicitly for developing countries76 and £71 million for purchasing for the UK ).

99.In the last 20 years, there have been eight outbreaks of a lethal virus, any of which could have escalated into a pandemic. The Prime Minister told the UN General Assembly that the UK would use its 2021 G7 presidency “to create a new global approach to health security based on a five point plan to protect humanity against another pandemic”–in summary: prevention (a global network of hubs to find and prepare solutions for threatening pathogens); prediction (an early warning system to spot new outbreaks ASAP); production (promotion of vaccine, etc. manufacturing capacity); preparedness (development of shared emergency plans & protocols); and partnership (free trade in anti-pandemic products like PPE).77

100.At a strategic level, we urge the PM and the Government to be more ambitious for the UK’s G7 Presidency than simply calling for better cooperation in spotting, preventing and fighting another pandemic more effectively. Rather, we recommend the Government lead a charge towards the establishment of a holistic global health and nutrition strategy based around achieving Sustainable Development Goal Three (ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for all at all ages) more broadly. This would put the world in a position to respond effectively to the next global health challenge, and the one after that, whatever these turn out to be—rather than just the last one we struggled with.