Professor Green said, ‘We need to be supporting creative, innovative, academic manufacturing and idea generation. We need to be supporting the scientists, not only in our universities but small biotech. At the front end, we’ve got to know what vaccines are going to be. We need the ability to demonstrate that they work in people, meaning effective Phase 1 clinical trials all happening in peacetime because that’s your foundation. And we need manufacturing capability for sufficient doses for the UK population kept warm.’
Professor Douglas said, ‘From the pandemic, we’ve learned that it is very important for the government to invest in innovative and rapid response vaccine manufacturing capability. Having something like a peacetime vaccines task force that invests, put in place the contract for emergency response and decides over time we’re going to invest in a range of platforms and pulls that capability that’s used to make other sorts of medicines in to serve the UK public for emergency vaccine response. We know other countries have learned that lesson.’
Dr Ritchie said, ‘We need a diversity of approaches and the UK having once been at the front, is falling behind because other countries are building capacity or building a way to pivot existing capacity to deal with an emergency in a way that’s supported and funded and actionable, we are not seeing that from the UK at the moment and it is a concern.’