During the fog of war in the Middle East, the government quietly made two contradictory moves within days of each other: it pledged to strengthen pandemic protection at home – yet withdrew from the global effort to stop pandemics at their source.
First, the Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper announced she plans to end the UK’s contribution to the Pandemic Fund, which supports countries to spot and stop outbreaks before they become global crises.
The government previously estimated that the chance of a pandemic on the scale of Covid-19 occurring in the next 25 years could be as high as 50 per cent. Even small investments in pandemic preparedness could have huge returns, hence the UK donated £25 million to set up the new Pandemic Fund led by an experienced World Bank staff member, Priya Basu.
Through a catalytic financing model, her team unlocked more than $10 billion (£7.4bn) in additional financing from domestic and international sources. This has allowed Ethiopia, for example, to train 2,700 health professionals in detection and response, Nepal to expand antimicrobial testing across most hospital laboratories, and even war-torn Yemen to set up nearly 3,000 early warning sites with rapid response teams.
Now, as part of slashing overseas aid further from its peak of £15.2 billion (0.7 per cent of Gross Domestic Product) in 2020, down to £9.4 billion (0.3 per cent of GDP) in 2027, the government has ended its contribution to the Pandemic Fund thereby losing its seat at the table as a sovereign investor.
Yet, just one week later, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) launched its Pandemic Preparedness Strategy, claiming “The UK government has learned crucial lessons from COVID-19”. Nothing could be further from the truth. The principles of the pandemic strategy make no mention of the need for early public health measures to suppress a coronavirus pandemic, but rather promote the discredited policy of “contain, delay, mitigate and recover” – the “herd immunity” strategy first proposed for Covid-19.
From 2020, the World Health Organisation emphasised daily the importance of suppression through community health workers mobilised to ensure case detection, contact tracing, immediate quarantine for 14 days and financial support to families asked to isolate. The new NHS strategy for pandemic control states “it will not be possible to halt the spread of a new pandemic virus and it would be a waste of public health resources to do so,” thereby contesting a key recommendation from the Covid-19 Public Inquiry for epidemic suppression.
The Health Select Committee in May 2020 criticised the chief medical officer and his team for ignoring what East Asian states had proved through rapid public health actions to suppress their epidemics. The committee’s Chair, Sir Jeremy Hunt, called it “one of the biggest failures of scientific advice to ministers in our lifetimes”. East Asian states immediately adopted robust and relatively simple public health actions, quickly suppressed their epidemics, and had death rates five times lower than Western countries with no national lockdowns. Had the UK followed the same strategy and achieved the same excess cumulative death rate by March 2024 as South Korea (69 instead of UK’s 344 deaths per 100,000), we might have prevented up to 180,000 UK deaths.
In 2020, we also saw the biggest impact on our gross domestic product for 300 years. The pandemic cost us over one trillion pounds from furlough payments, business support, procurement of tests and protective equipment, and Bank of England action to protect inflation through quantitative easing.
This new Preparedness Strategy raises serious questions about whether the UK can protect itself from a future coronavirus pandemic. We need to know whether it’s supported by Baroness Hallett, Cabinet Secretary Dame Antonia Romeo, Chief Scientific Adviser Dame Angela McLean and her predecessor Lord Vallance, a cabinet minister.
It states: “The UK government remains committed to global health security through bilateral and multilateral engagement and support for multilateral organisations and global health initiatives.” But it is impossible to square this claim with the decision to pull out of the Pandemic Fund – a global initiative to bolster health security that ministers now seem determined to turn their backs on.
Anthony Costello is professor of global health and sustainable development at University College London (UCL)
This article has been produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project