Pressure on PM to share jabs with poorer nations ahead of G7

More than 100 cross-party MPs and peers have urged Boris Johnson to show “global leadership” by donating more Covid-19 vaccines to poorer countries ahead of the G7 summit.

In a letter to Downing Street, politicians called on Boris Johnson to follow his “moral duty” by committing to a “one in, one out” policy for jabs ahead of the G7 summit. The PM is set to chair the gathering of the most economically powerful countries in the world in Cornwall next week.

For every dose bought for use in Britain, the signatories want the UK government to donate a dose to the United Nations-backed Covax vaccine-sharing scheme, which is providing vaccines to low and middle-income countries.

“While the UK has rightly committed funding to Covax, we remain a net importer of COVID-19 vaccines,” the letter said. It added: “The longer we wait to act, the more likely it is that dangerous variants could emerge that can evade the protections offered by current vaccines.”

Covax has delivered over 70 million doses to 126 countries and economies since February. But The World Health Organisation warned last week that the terrible surge of the virus in India has had a severe impact on the scheme’s supply chain.

One of the MPs who is calling for faster action from the UK government is Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran. She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that although the UK had repeatedly said it would start giving doses to the scheme, “as yet not a single dose has actually been donated”.

She called on the government to start donating jabs “as a matter of urgency” and said it should come to an agreement on intellectual property rights that allowed other countries around the world to manufacture their own vaccines.

The letter comes as the World Health Organization, the International Monetary Fund, World Bank Group and the World Trade Organization used a joint plea across a range of international newspapers to call for richer countries to give more Covid vaccines to poor nations or risk new variants bringing fresh lockdowns.

The heads of the organisations said: “Increasingly, a two-track pandemic is developing. Inequitable vaccine distribution is not only leaving untold millions of people vulnerable to the virus, it is also allowing deadly variants to emerge and ricochet back across the world.”

They added: “’Even countries with advanced vaccination programmes have been forced to reimpose stricter public health measures. It need not be this way.”

Matt Hancock, the health secretary, has previously said that the UK “has probably done more than any other nation to help vaccinate the world’s poorest” and provided a “gift to the world” through its support for the Oxford vaccine. He said the government had also donated more than £500m to the Covax scheme.