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

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6Conclusion

101.Overall, we applaud the contribution made by the UK to the international community’s response to coronavirus; and the Government’s recognition that a global pandemic necessitates a global solution. We commend the strong signals of the UK’s intent to engage fully with the international community in current and future concerted efforts to tackle global health security as part of wider work on global health in general.78

102.We note the Government’s recent evidence to us that:

Decisions about long-term funding for UK ODA on global health security will be taken at the upcoming Spending Review, including how we can best further elements of the PM’s 5-point plan through ODA investments. The forthcoming Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy (IR) consolidates much of this thinking on using the aid budget as a force for good and in the national interest, including on global health security.

And that this focus:

… forms part of the UK’s wider commitments to global health. These include: the manifesto commitments to end the preventable deaths of mothers, newborns and children and lead the way on malaria; our support to achieve universal health coverage, strengthen health systems and health security; and our objective to promote healthier lives and environments, including safely managed water and sanitation, healthy diets and sustainable food systems.79

103.However, we would welcome a clear commitment to the development of a UK global health strategy as an effective, prioritised and costed home for all these relevant strands of work and which would include an explicit set of goals and milestones for assessing progress.

104.We highlight the clear consensus in our evidence that the coronavirus has posed challenges to progress across the full spectrum of development activity. Regaining this lost ground, let alone ‘building back better’, will require the application of even more energy and innovation as well as resources; resources that should not be diverted unthinkingly from existing activity into coronavirus-only, or coronavirus-specific, programmes. Hence our sympathy with the nascent view of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee that investment into R&D to produce coronavirus vaccines and other medicines—while absolutely vital—may not all be ODA-eligible.

105.In the meantime, we welcome the increase in UK core funding for the somewhat beleaguered World Health Organisation; and also in particular the direct, and the conditional, resources for the Covax initiative aimed at the obviously ODA-eligible goal of ensuring that people in all corners of the developing world will get access to Covid-19 vaccines—once available—regardless of their individual income or the economic power of their country.80 This initiative may well soon receive its first challenge in the equitable distribution of the first effective vaccine to be emerging from clinical trials.81 We look forward to tracking progress and performance in this endeavour and reporting further in due course.

106.We hope to be able to scrutinise the unfolding work to implement all the Government’s commitments. In the immediate future, a further inquiry will focus on selected secondary impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, and efforts to contain it, as well as considering available evidence about effective or promising interventions to mitigate such impacts.82