Invest in jabs like we invest in the Army, says vaccine creator

BRITAIN must invest in vaccines like it invests in the Armed Forces, to keep people safe, the creator of the Oxford Astrazeneca vaccine has said as she warned Covid-19 would not be the last pandemic to “threaten our lives”.

Prof Dame Sarah Gilbert called for caution following the emergence of the omicron variant, warning that the Covid-19 pandemic was not over, and that future pandemics were inevitable.

She believes a disease outbreak after Covid could be “more contagious, or more lethal, or both”.

Dame Sarah said: “We need to think about defending our health in the way we currently think about defending our country.

“We have an Army, a Navy, and Air Force even though we haven’t recently been at risk of invasion – but we need to keep funding them just in case.

“We need to be to be funding health defences just in case, then they will be there to call on.”

Speaking at the 44th Richard Dimbleby Lecture which will be aired on BBC One tonight, she added: “Just as

‘We need to think about defending our health in the way we think about defending our country’

we invest in armed forces and intelligence and diplomacy to defend against wars, we must invest in people, research, manufacturing and institutions to defend against pandemics.”

Dame Sarah, who was recognised in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to public health, has complained that funding for vaccine development is often difficult to procure, and called for the large-scale and rapid response to Covid to become the rule and not the exception.

She said: “We cannot allow a situation where we have gone through all we have gone through, and then find that the enormous economic losses we have sustained mean that there is still no funding for pandemic preparedness.

“The advances we have made, and the knowledge we have gained, must not be lost.”

She added: “The experts who responded rapidly and worked relentlessly in 2020 and 2021 – without whom we would still be at the mercy of the virus – must not now be asked to fade back into underfunded obscurity.”

Dame Sarah has said that the vaccines continue to be effective against new Covid variants, but said in regard to the emergence of the omicron variant: “Until we know more, we should be cautious, and take steps to slow down the spread of this new variant.”