COVID inquiry into UK government should probe global response, NGOs say

A coalition of health and development NGOs are calling to expand an official inquiry into the U.K. government’s domestic response to COVID-19 to also consider what role the country played in increasing global inequality during the pandemic, Devex can exclusively report.

Officially launched in July, the UK COVID-19 Inquiry is tasked with conducting a broad independent investigation of the British government’s pandemic response, including an initial focus on the imposition of lockdowns and handling of scientific advice, with a specific eye on how communities were impacted differently. It will expand over time to address, among other issues, questions around vaccines and therapeutics.

It is not, however, tasked with considering the role that the United Kingdom played in the international response.

“Pandemics don’t respect borders, so to limit the inquiry entirely to the domestic context ignores, fundamentally, the logic of a pandemic response,” Harry Bignell, a health policy adviser at Oxfam GB, told Devex.

Oxfam GB is one of the nine organizations, including Save the Children UK, Médecins Sans Frontières UK, and Health Poverty Action, that have signed onto the letter sent Monday to broaden the scope of the inquiry, led by Heather Hallett, a retired appeals court judge. The request comes alongside a new report from another signatory, RESULTS UK, entitled, “Paternalism and Power in UK Pandemic Preparedness and Response.”

The report details what the NGO sees as the country’s role “in the global failure to ensure equitable access to COVID-19 health tools, including decisions which actively undermined access, and thus recovery, in low- and middle-income countries.”

Though U.K. officials have proclaimed that “no one is safe until everyone is safe,” the report charges that the government contributed to the global inequities, including by pre-purchasing an outsized number of vaccines when they first emerged. That limited the supplies available to COVAX — the global purchasing facility that aimed to make affordable vaccine supplies available to LMICs.

The government did ultimately announce plans at the G-7 meeting last summer in Carbis Bay to donate 100 million vaccines by June 2022 — the bulk of them through COVAX. Ultimately, the UK failed to meet its goal, distributing only 85 million doses by the deadline.

The RESULTS report also details how the government participated in systems that ultimately stood in the way of global initiatives to redress the inequities it helped to create.

“The systems themselves and expectations and norms set up around this are, in a way, institutionally racist and institutionally inequitable,” Aaron Oxley, the executive director of RESULTS, told Devex. “We see that coming out very perversely through some of the decision making throughout the pandemic response.”

That includes the U.K.’s opposition to the TRIPS waiver — a proposal by the South African and Indian delegations to the World Trade Organization to temporarily waive patents and other intellectual property barriers to COVID-19 vaccines, tests, and treatments. Britain’s opposition was critical to stalling the proposal, observers said, leading to a watered-down version of the original waiver that was adopted by WTO in June.

The final agreement offered some flexibility to an existing restriction on exporting generic vaccines, but otherwise largely restated existing rules. Limited only to patents, it ignored the call from India and South Africa to temporarily waive protections on trade secrets, copyrights, and industrial designs, while also postponing any decision on COVID-19 treatments or tests.

The government has also not offered support to schemes such as the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool, a transfer mechanism to make technical know-how widely available to expedite the production of generic vaccines, treatments, and tests.

Bignell told Devex that this pattern of “actions that weakened access to global COVID-19 tools” contributed to preventable deaths overseas, even as it created conditions for variants to emerge, which ultimately undermined the government’s own domestic response.

A government spokesperson disputed the characterization, telling Devex in an email that “The UK has been at the forefront of the international response to COVID-19, spending over £2.1 billion since 2020 to help end the pandemic, and joining a landmark consensus on TRIPS among WTO members in Geneva earlier this year.”

With the inquiry entering its second module, which focuses on core political and administrative governance and decision making by the government, Bignell said it was “the most obvious opportunity for the inquiry to consider the U.K.’s role in the international response.”

In the letter to the inquiry, the NGOs advance that an examination of both the domestic and international response “will provide a thorough evidence base of lessons learnt and, therefore, inform a rigorous plan for future pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.”

Representatives from the inquiry did not respond to a request for comment about whether they might consider expanding their examination.

Among the specific requests in the RESULTS report is a call for the government to demand more inclusive representation of global health multilateral organizations going forward, including more representatives from LMICs. The NGOs also want to see a TRIPS waiver that extends to therapeutics and tests and for the U.K. to return to its 0.7% commitment of its gross national income to official development assistance, after it fell to 0.5% in 2020.

Ultimately, it will be up to the government to adopt any recommendations that emerge from the report. But Bignell said the inquiry serves a very clear purpose: “We’re trying to find out what happened, why, who’s responsible, who’s accountable, and what can be done to prevent this vast inequity from happening again.”