 I ask members who are leaving the chamber to do so as quickly and as quietly as possible. The final item of business is a member's business debate on motion 2360, in the name of Sarah Boyack, on ending pharmaceutical monopolies of Covid-19 vaccines. This debate will be concluded without any questions being put, as ever I would ask members who wish to participate to press the request-to-speak buttons as soon as possible or place an R in the chat function. I call on Sarah Boyack, who joins us remotely, to open the debate for around seven minutes, Ms Boyack. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. First of all, I do want to thank colleagues for their support in getting us tonight's debate. If the last few months have taught us anything, it's that we are not safe until everyone is safe. But there is a massive inequality in access to vaccines across the globe. As of last week, in high income countries, 66 per cent of people had been vaccinated with at least one dose, but in low-income countries, only 9 per cent of people had been vaccinated with at least one dose. With Omicron cases rising daily, it has never been more important to debate the need to end pharmacutical monopolies of Covid-19 vaccines. To address the cost of vaccinating 70 per cent of the population in high-income countries, it would mean an increase of 0.8 per cent in healthcare spending, but in low-income countries, an eye-watering 56 per cent increase would be needed. That money is simply not available. It was noted in the excellent briefing from the People's Vaccine Alliance that work has been on-going to get a solution. In October last year, South Africa and India submitted a joint proposal to the trade-related aspects of international intellectual property rights council at the World Trade Organization, titled waiver from certain provisions of the trips agreement for the prevention, containment and treatment of Covid-19. But the UK Government rejected the text on the waiver at the trips council meeting in October, saying in that year that it wasn't necessary, while also stating that existing measures to overcome intellectual property barriers would suffice. The waiver would allow all world trade organisation members to choose to not grant or not enforce patents and other IPs related to Covid-19 drugs, vaccines, diagnostics and other technologies until widespread vaccination is in place globally and the majority of the world's population has developed immunity. It would only be applicable to Covid-19 technologies. In debates and discussions about vaccinations, it is easy to get caught up in the numbers and the percentage. As a key job for us, as MSPs, recognising our own Government on making vaccines available and now boosters accessible for our constituents. However, we know that there is more than a delay in rolling out vaccines globally. The more there is a delay, the more people suffer. Right now, as Oxfam has pointed out in its campaign, the whole world is dependent on just a handful of pharmaceutical corporations who simply cannot make enough vaccines for everyone. As a country that rightly prides itself on the universality of our NHS, it is morally indefensible that we are not taking every possible action to waive the rules that are creating vaccine monopolies and allowing large pharmaceutical companies to profit off the back of a global pandemic. In my motion, I note that those monopolies are artificially limiting vaccine supply to low-income countries and that the vaccine inequality has resulted from a handful of companies rationing supply about refusing to share their vaccine recipes and their know-how with the rest of the world. That must end now. As former Prime Minister Gordon Brown highlighted in the Guardian, in June, Boris Johnson promised that he and the G7 countries would use their vaccine surplus to immunise the whole world. In September, at a summit chaired by President Biden, a December target of 40 per cent vaccination was set for the 92 poorest countries. Two and a half months on, there is a little chance of this target being met in at least 82 of them. By Thursday, the United States, which to its credit has been responsible for half the vaccines donated, had still delivered only 25 per cent of the vaccines promised. We are now living as a world with the consequences of those broken promises. It is not all doom and gloom, however. I do want to welcome the fantastic work of the People's Vaccine Alliance, a prize of organisations such as Oxfam, Christian Aid and Global Justice. People's Vaccine Alliance continues to advocate for fairness and an end to vaccine inequalities. My original motion, very similar to the one that we are debating today, gained the support of 55 MSPs. To our credit, following my motion being laid, First Minister wrote to the Prime Minister, urging him to support the waiver. However, one letter is not enough. I would like to hear what work the Scottish Government is doing behind the scenes, working with UK Government colleagues to ensure that those opposed to the waiver are challenged and to work with campaigners. Under the Conservatives across the chamber tonight, I would like you to say what work you are doing to communicate with your colleagues in Westminster to get a different outcome. In June, the European Parliament supported a temporary Covid-19 vaccine patient waiver. It was not the unanimous vote, but it reflected the strong agreement that action was urgently needed to produce affordable vaccines that could be distributed across the globe. Evidence from the Covid-19 response so far and many other public health issues throughout history, including that AIDS crisis in the 2000s, clearly illustrates that IP does restrict access, and this will only get worse unless Governments intervene. The issue of high-price medicines has become a global problem, not just affecting low-income countries but middle- and high-income countries alike. In the UK in the past few years, we have seen a breakthrough, hepatitis C medicine, being rationed on the NHS due to its high cost, cancer patients having the crowd fund and campaign for treatments that have not been available on the NHS, and cystic fibrosis patients having to wait over three years to access a new therapy as a pharmacurical company priced the drug above the reach of our NHS. Even though we have vaccines in Scotland, our NHS is under massive pressures from the pandemic, but let us just imagine, colleagues, what the Covid pressures look like in a low-income country with a small health budget and even fewer resources. I want to thank colleagues for their support in getting us to debate tonight. I will continue the campaign on the need to raise political action to focus on the concrete steps that we through the Scottish Parliament and how individual MSPs can take to bring vaccine equality globally. We need a life-saving escalation in global vaccine production to ensure that people in low-income countries are kept safe, because, as I said at the start of my contribution, we are not safe until everyone is safe. Thank you very much indeed, Ms Boyack. I remind members to direct their comments through the chair. I call first Emma Harper to be followed by Carl Mocken for in four minutes, Ms Harper. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I congratulate Sarah Boyack on securing the debate, and Ms Boyack has rightly outlined the issue of vaccine monopolies. I need to remind members that I am a nurse, and I am part of the NHS to the Freezing Allways vaccine team, although I have not done many booster shifts recently, but I have one schedule coming up on December 30. I support the calls from charities for the Prime Minister to waive intellectual property rules and to insist that vaccine technology is shared with the World Health Organization's Covid-19 technology access pool. As Action Aid pointed out, more than 200 million people have contracted Covid-19 infection during this pandemic. More than 4.5 million people have died, and at least nine new billionaires have been minted because of Covid. That must change. Instead of creating vaccine billionaires, we must vaccinate the billions of people across the globe. Access to vaccines is not solely about ethics or fairness, but it is also about reducing and limiting the reach and spread of a global and deadly virus. Ensuring global access to Covid-19 vaccinations is in everyone's interest. It will have many knock-on advantages for societies, economies and businesses and supply chains across the whole globe. At the end of September, the United Nations chief Antonio Guterres spoke to world leaders on the disgraceful state of vaccine inequality, calling it, and I quote, a moral indictment of the state of the world. It is an obscenity. In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, vaccines have been produced, and although the proportion of the population needed to safely achieve global immunity to Covid-19 is uncertain, the World Health Organization has highlighted that herd immunity against measles and polio required 80 to 95 per cent of the population to be vaccinated. That means that, to be more effective, the use of vaccines will likely need to be more widespread, globally widespread. However, currently, the availability differs vastly from country to country. Work by our world in data project at the University of Oxford has shown the differences in availability of vaccines. Using data from Governments and Health Ministries around the world, the project provides daily updates on global vaccination levels. On 23 August 2021, it reported that 32.5 per cent of the world population had received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine and 24.5 with two vaccines. However, only 1.4 per cent of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose. Many of those low-income countries could be considered part of the global south. 1.4 per cent is an incredibly low number. In April 2020, a global initiative called COVAX was set up to ensure fair access to Covid-19 vaccines between countries, regardless of their income level. Jointly directed by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, CEPI, the Vaccine Alliance Gavi in the World Health Organization, the initiative pulls global funding to invest in research, manufacture, purchase and distribution of vaccines. However, most high-income countries, including here in the UK, have made direct deals with manufacturers. That has led to high-income countries dominating the purchasing and administration of vaccines. As a consequence, vast regions of the world experience a rapid rise in Covid cases and deaths are unable to access vaccines, which is our primary route out of the pandemic. Companies such as Pfizer and Moderna are currently selling—sure, I will take an intervention. Stephen Kerr. Emma Harper, I hope, recognises that it is because the major economies of the world were prepared to make those advanced purchases. Even though there was no vaccine in existence that supported the research, development and introduction of those vaccines, that is a good thing. I hope that, in her comment, she is not denigrating the actions of the UK Government and other Governments around the world in making those investment decisions very wisely. Emma Harper, I can give you the time back. Okay. Thank you for that intervention. What I am keen to do is make sure that we are aware that a lot of public funding went into the development of the vaccines as well, public funding from the UK. It is great that we have those vaccines, but, as Sarah Boyack pointed out, we are just going to go round and round with a new variant. I am coming to that in a bit more detail. I will point out that Pfizer and Moderna are selling more than 90 per cent of the vaccines to rich countries, charging up to 24 times the potential cost of production, according to analysis by Alliance. It costs about $1.08 to produce a vaccine dose, and those are being sold to countries in the global south for $9.72 each. Last week, a former surgeon colleague of mine, Mr Fannis Dreyer, who is the new president of the International Federation of Surgical Colleges, told me last week that the only way to reduce new variants in the transmission of the virus is to ensure that the world is vaccinated. That is exactly what Antonio Gutierrez also echoed. He said that if the virus is allowed to spread like wildfire in the global south, it will mutate it again and again. That can prolong the pandemic significantly, enabling the virus to come back to plague the global north. It does benefit us if we look at whatever we can do to make this vaccine available globally. I again call on the Prime Minister to act in the interest of global public health and address intellectual property law and ensure that vaccine tech and know-how is shared globally. I am so delighted to support Sarah Boyack in this important motion. I believe that adequate healthcare is a basic right that everyone should enjoy, and that includes the right to be vaccinated against Covid. Had we taken that approach globally rather than simply looking at Covid as a national issue, we might not be in the situation that we are in now. For the very first moments, the crisis struck a strange territorialism, and that has come forth rather than the co-operation that we need. Whether it is seeking to apportion blame to China or looking at vaccination tables such as a football league, that attitude is quite wrong. Where prevention and co-operation has worked at its best is the rapidity of the vaccine production and the goodwill from members of our own communities. They have looked after each other. Every one of us has been impressed by that spirit. I assure you that not one person that I have spoken to thinks that it is wise to deprive others of the vaccine simply to protect corporate intellectual property. What we must recognise is that the idea of the vaccines that were created by the private sector alone is utter nonsense. There is no such thing as a solely private sector research and development when it comes to pharmaceuticals. Most of the technologies and formulas used to reach the point where a vaccine could even be made possible began decades ago in state-funded laboratories across the world. They have found success on the back of others' work. It is not a sole effort. By refusing to make those formulas and vaccines available globally, we are simply shooting ourselves in the foot as well as dooming millions to the worst possible exposure to Covid, a significant number of whom will die. We can have lockdown after lockdown, but, in a global and free-flowing economy, the movement of people will always bring new cases and new strains back to those shores. Why, then, should companies have benefited from state subsidy and public research be able to deprive in-need countries of vaccine technology and know-how or make them completely unaffordable? Those are the worst aspects of market capitalism and it is truly shameful. The fact is that plenty of people have looked at Covid as an opportunity and ranked it in cash. Whether it is dodgy PPE companies with links to UK ministers or multinational retailers hiking up prices, there is a cash grab going on and it must not be allowed to happen with people's health. We have some fortune in this country, at least, where tests, vaccines and treatments are all free. Sadly, in the world's wealthiest nations, people are expected to bankrupt themselves to simply fund simple drugs such as insulin and are now being asked to pay for Covid tests too. Their homes are taken away and their livelihoods are ruined just to make it to the next month. I know that my party says that a lot, but thank goodness for the NHS and the fantastic work of those pioneers in the 1940s. We too could have ended up with a similar system based on primal greed and selfishness. In the spirit of that legacy, I back Sarah Boyack's call to the Prime Minister, we must wave intellectual property rules and insist that the vaccine know-how and technology is shared via the World Health Organization's Covid-19 technology access pool. As soon as possible, Britain should lead the way on something positive, rather than spending all our time discussing how to cut overseas aid or close our borders to fleeing refugees. We must do the right thing. Wouldn't that be a Christmas message to send to the world? I thank my Lothian colleague Sarah Boyack for bringing the debate to the chamber this afternoon. The UK Government is already supplying vaccines to less-developed, low-income countries, and the World Health Organization has acknowledged that the UK is a leading country in that respect. By the end of 2021, the UK Government will have donated 20 million more Oxford AstraZeneca vaccines to countries in need as part of our country's 100 million commitment. A further 10 million of Oxford AstraZeneca vaccines have been sent to the UK to covax. Those additional donations mean that 30.6 million surplus doses of Oxford AstraZeneca will have been given to those in need in 2021. While further donations in 2022 will mean that our entire UK Janssen supply and half of the UK Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine supply will have been donated or will be donated to countries in need. Oxford is one of the world's most widely used vaccines, accounting for more than half of all the covax deliveries. Thanks to AstraZeneca's commitment to the UK Government to distribute the vaccine on a non-profit basis, 1.5 billion doses have been used in more than 170 countries. Does my colleague agree that that is why the rhetoric that we heard a few moments ago from Carl Mawkins is so regrettable to rail against businesses such as AstraZeneca who are doing what they are doing in conjunction—admittedly, of course—in conjunction with Governments, including the UK Government, but to rail against them, the way that we just heard from Carl Mawkins, deeply regrettable, is not it, in this debate? Thank you, Mr Kerr. Yes, indeed, we have the best scientists in this country, at the universities and in industry. It was with Government, industry and research that brought together the opportunity that we had to be leading the way in terms of vaccination. Surplus donations alone will not be enough to allow us to defeat the pandemic, and that is why the UK is backing the Oxford AstraZeneca production model while providing development countries with the financial support that they need to obtain vaccines. It is not as simple as giving away the developing countries the intellectual property, as the manufacturing process might not be able to deliver the product in some places, and that has been stated by AstraZeneca. However, the commitment to providing the initially developed vaccine at cost and perpetuity for less developed countries is extremely welcome. Domestic need for the current booster programme will be met through our mRNA vaccines and Oxford AstraZeneca, meaning that the UK, as I have said, can donate its full Jansson order to developing countries. The UK continues to proactively manage our vaccine supply and does not hold a stockpile of Covid vaccines. All procured, regulated doses are either used rapidly by our domestic programme or already shared internationally with countries in need. Let us not ignore the role of other manufacturing arrangements that are being made. Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, announced at the start of December that it had reached an agreement to access an additional 150 million doses of the mRNA vaccine against Covid-19 manufactured by Moderna to be made available to COVAX at the lowest global tiered price. The amendment to the existing advanced purchase agreement between Gavi and Moderna means that a total of up to 650 million doses of Moderna vaccine would be available to COVAX participants through 2021 and 2022. Furthermore, as part of an urgent call for manufacturers to prioritise supply to COVAX, Gavi and Moderna have reached agreement to make available 20 million doses to COVAX. Those doses, originally scheduled to be released to COVAX rather in quarter 1 2022, are now going to be available in this quarter, accelerating the response. We need to be mindful and acknowledge how the innovative global initiatives between Governments, research and industry are all coming together to tackle the massive challenge ahead of us. We are not out of this pandemic until we are all out of this pandemic, as Ms Boyack said earlier. We need to help others while ensuring that we contain the virus here as well. I therefore welcome both the UK Government's commitment to and their action in sending 100 million vaccines to countries in need. Thank you very much indeed, Ms Weber. Before calling the next speaker, I remind members who want to participate, including by intervention, that they will need to put their card in their devices. I thank my friend Sarah Boyack for tabling the debate in Parliament. Covid has brought out the very best in our society, but it has also brought out some of the very worst. In our local communities, we have seen solidarity in action. The power of people coming together, helping one another, benefiting everyone. In the globalised world of big business, however, too many have viewed the pandemic and the human misery that it has wrought as a commercial opportunity, a racket from which excessive profits can be plundered. Take the giant pharmaceutical companies, monopolistic private corporations benefiting from billions of pounds of public money to research and develop the Covid vaccines, and now they are raking off massive pay-outs to line the pockets of the idle and undeserving rich. The People's Vaccine Alliance, which includes leading UK charities such as Oxfam and Action Aid, estimate that Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna alone stand to siphon off almost £50,000 a minute in profits this year alone. That is double the median annual wage in Scotland every minute. Emma Harper I thank Mr Leonard for taking an intervention. Some of the figures that I quoted were that it is $1.08 to produce a vaccine dose, but they are being sold to countries in the global south for $9.72. Do you think that that is something that should be addressed? Yes, I do. That is why the motion talks about monopolies and excessive profitering, because that is what is going on. Let us take AstraZeneca. AstraZeneca, which until very recently made a virtue of selling doses at a cost price, is still laughing all the way to the bank after making the equivalent of £1.5 billion from its vaccine in the first nine months of this year. If you want to know what an upward curve looks like, compare Moderna's share price in early 2020 to its share price today. There are those who say that when businesses profit, we all do. I do not believe that, because if it was true, we would all be sharing in the success of big pharma. If it was true, vaccine rates in poorer countries would not be catastrophically low. If it was true, the walls of patent protection of gas and of trade-related intellectual property rights would be tumbling down, but they are not. We hear complaints about delays in getting access to the vaccine here—booster appointments not before the bells but a month away. However, when you think that fewer than 6 per cent of people in Africa are fully vaccinated at all, and in Africa's largest nation, Nigeria, it is just 2 per cent, there is a much bigger crime taking place right in front of us. No wonder that nursing trade unions, representing more than 2.5 million health workers across 28 countries, have described the situation as vaccine apartheid, and they are right. They have lodged a formal challenge before the United Nations over the refusal of the UK, Switzerland, the EU and others under pressure from these drugs companies to lift the patents on Covid vaccines. South Africa, where Omicron was first identified, has been one of the countries pressing the world trade organisation to change the rules to widen access. I say to those, including those on the Tory benches, who continue to oppose this, that the public health case is irresistible, the humanitarian justification is unanswerable and the moral case is irrefutable. I say as well that, if we do not act now, we are not only putting more people's lives at risk, we are condemning the world to a cycle of outbreak containment, outbreak containment. Waving those patents will be an active equality and an expression of our common humanity. Of course, it would need to be forged into a reality by global investment in the mass production, distribution and exchange of vaccines across the world. The skewed allocation of the worldwide vaccine roll-out is one of the clearest examples that we have of not just the global inequality of wealth but the global inequality of power. In many ways, the pandemic has given us a glimpse of how things could be, the solidarity that we have seen in our communities, but it has also shone a light on how unequal our society is. Let's start here. Let's end this racket. Let's put the needs of the people before the greed and profiteering of the corporations. Let's get behind a people's vaccine and let's go into 2022 with renewed hope that together we can defeat this virus and with the message loud and clear that we simply cannot and we simply will not wait any longer for global justice. I now call on Maggie Chapman to be followed by Paul Sweeney for around four minutes. I thank Sarah Boyack for bringing this debate this evening and acknowledge and thank all the organisations that she referred to earlier who are campaigning against vaccine apartheid. As someone who is double vaccinated and boosted by the bells, I am very grateful to all those involved in the development, distribution and giving of the vaccines. However, I am very aware that I am in a hugely privileged position. I am also aware of how easy it is to take all of this for granted. I have not always had comfort of access to healthcare free at the point of need nor the certainty of preventive medical care when needed. And yet I am reminded every time I speak to family and friends in Southern Africa just how lucky I am and just how unequal the world is. I say luck, but really luck has very little to do with it. The global health inequalities that we see are a product of political and economic decisions. They are a product of colonialism and empire. They are a product, as we have heard already this evening, of capitalism and greed. Why do we accept a world where generic life-saving drugs such as those for HIV, AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria that the world health organisation includes on its essential medicines list can be sold at prices up to 150 times the cost to produce them, package them, tax them and then get 10 per cent profit? Those of the generic medicines, brand name drugs, can be much more expensive. A short while ago Emma Harper has outlined the cost to price differential for Covid vaccines. Why do we accept this? We know that global health inequalities we see are not inevitable. That means that if we seriously believe that no one is safe until everyone is safe, we need to change this unequal and unjust system. We know that one of the key reasons that Omicron and other novel variants of Covid will arise is because vaccines have not been made available to the global south in anything like the numbers needed—£3 billion—just in early 2022 already. No, I am not going to take an intervention. While we are getting third doses, many have not even had access to one dose. That creates the conditions for viruses to mutate and avoid the human immune system, just like SARS-CoV-2 has done in developing both delta and Omicron variants. It is truly the case with vaccines that the only way for any of us to be safe is for all of us to be vaccinated. The argument for making vaccines available to the global south is one of social justice, of global justice, but it is also one of self-interest. We need to ensure that we have vaccine equality and the proposal that we deploy the trips exclusion for vaccine manufacture is vital. The decision by countries, particularly the United States, to stockpile vaccines only for them to go out of date and be destroyed, is criminal, I think. I am sure that everyone or many of us around this chamber will join me in condemning that atrocious selfishness. We need to do more. Even if we had the vaccines available in the global south, the global south does not necessarily have all the infrastructure it needs to roll out the vaccines at the rate needed to keep us all safe. That is one function of our neocolonial approach to the global south, but it is something that we can and must rapidly fix. We know that mRNA vaccines will give us the opportunity to develop resistance to a much wider range of viruses. From the potential HIV vaccine, we should offer those in the global south the access to the newly available immunisations by building a global vaccine programme that can be quickly switched to emergency vaccination for the next novel virus that could decimate lives across the world. That infrastructure will offer real and on-going defences. While billionaires are going on joy rides in space, a really fitting mission for our world should be to create a global programme for vaccinating as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. It is more than time for us to rest power from the pharmaceutical companies and their interests and act in the interests of all, so we can all be truly safe. I thank Sarah Boyack for bringing that motion for debate and some stirring speeches that we have heard tonight. It is clear from what we have heard this evening that viruses have no regard for the human invention of national barriers. They flow with the current of humanity around the world. That interdependency is one of the great strengths of the civilization, but, as we have seen in the past couple of years, it is a major vulnerability, too. To not have a coherent global vaccination strategy is a bit like your house going on fire, but then only being interested in putting out the fire in the room that you are in. Eventually, of course, the house will be engulfed in flames anyway, and worse still, we are denying our housemates the tools to fight the fire. We have seen it with the Omicron variant. Originating in South Africa, a country with a fully vaccinated rate of just 26 per cent has made its way to the UK, resulting in increased restrictions on our lives once again. It is no doubt that history will repeat itself with new variants time and time again, unless we make vaccinating the rest of the world a priority. Just three weeks ago, the UK acquired 114 million doses of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, and of the more than 450 million doses that have been acquired since the start of the pandemic, the UK has donated just 70 million to the global south—a figure that we must see increased dramatically. Surely, Deputy Presiding Officer, given the significant public investment expenditure that went into funding the development of the vaccines in the first place, we, the citizens, should expect better from the manufacturers. As time goes by, barriers to vaccine production at a global scale have been erected by large vaccine manufacturers, and we are all playing the price. In Africa, one in four health workers are vaccinated, while in developed countries three in four health workers have received their vaccinations. For the general population, a mere 8 per cent of adults in Africa are vaccinated. In this effort to increase equality across the world cannot simply mean donating surplus vaccines from our own stocks, a move that simply foists vaccines with short expiry dates on strained healthcare systems that cannot always administer them, but must mean a fundamental rethink of the way that the intellectual property for vaccines operates. Right now, surely it is undoubtedly in the global public interest to provide access to vaccines and the technologies that are required to produce them in the regions that need them most. It has been over a year since the South African and Indian delegations to the World Trade Organization tabled their proposal to temporarily waive the trips to intellectual property protections governing Covid-19 vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics. 77 per cent of the 6.4 billion vaccine doses so far ministered globally have gone to people in high and upper middle-income countries, but the proposal remains stalled despite the support of more than 100 countries. That is European and UK opposition arising from nebulous concerns about the impact on pharmaceutical innovation that has been enough to block the waiver's adoption. At the very least, if we had taken that step a year ago and started that process a year ago, a lot of countries would have been a better spot, we would be facing a different global landscape. So says Rachel Thrasher, a researcher at Boston University's Global Development Policy Centre. A position of lack of control over productive capacity amid rampant vaccine nationalism has resulted in only nine African countries hitting a world health organisation benchmark to vaccinate 10 per cent of their populations by the end of September this year. I think now we understand that the price we have to pay to install vaccine production capacity around the world is far smaller than the price that we are all paying now as a result of the Omicron variant. That goes to attention at the heart of our public and private realms. Self-interest and the private profit interest versus the public good that benefits all of mankind. Indeed, we are seeing this play out in the UK itself. The Conservative Bench has made much play about the UK vaccine, but the UK Government is just about to sell the vaccine manufacturing innovation centre in Oxfordshire, which has yet to open despite investing £200 million in the investment to ensure that we can have vaccine sovereignty in the UK so that we can control the distribution and production of vaccines globally. Indeed, the French company Valneva, which has been investing in a vaccine production facility in Livingston, has now stopped that effort because of the UK's controversial decision to cancel its order for Valneva vaccines in September. That was described as a disaster that this is not continuing. Is this the symptom of how we are not even making an effort to build that vaccine sovereignty in the UK? It never remains justice for the rest of the world. We now move to ministerial response to the debate. I call on the minister to respond for up to seven minutes. I fully recognise that the Covid-19 pandemic is an unprecedented global health crisis. The emergence of the Omicron variant serves as a really stark reminder that no one will be safe until we are all safe, as many have said this evening. That crisis calls for an unprecedented global response. Frankly, that is what we have seen from pharmaceutical companies. As the First Minister outlined on Friday, Omicron has now become the dominant stream in Scotland. The surge in cases is already putting significant pressure on our health services and will have an impact on businesses. Scotland has made difficult decisions to introduce new measures to combat the rising wave of Omicron cases. We all need to play our part to slow down the speed of transmission, including reducing social contact, taking a test before joining activities and, most importantly, getting vaccinated. I agree that more action is needed to prevent new, more dangerous variants developing and spreading across the globe. The best action available to us is to vaccinate as many people worldwide as possible. That will help to protect lives and livelihoods globally. At the start of the pandemic, it was far from certain that we would have vaccines available for use within a year. On 8 December 2020, the UK became the first country in the world to deploy an approved Covid-19 vaccination. As a pharmacist, I am absolutely in awe of the speed of that development. It is quite incredible how many academic brains came together with some underwriting from Governments to rise to meet a global challenge. It is astonishing that we have managed to develop a vaccine in one year. I absolutely hope that we can maintain some of that collaborative effort for future use, because we have plenty more challenges that I would like to see us work together on. The World Health Organization currently recognises nine vaccines and several more are under development. Those vaccines, alongside other non-pharmaceutical interventions such as hand hygiene and face masks, are estimated to have the number of potential fatalities from Covid-19 at a global level. They have saved over 27,000 lives here in Scotland. It is really important to recognise the vital work that researchers, manufacturers and all those involved in developing the vaccines have contributed and continue to contribute. It is thanks to their collective efforts that we have a range of safe and effective vaccines available. I thank the minister for taking the intervention. Can I ask what the Scottish Government is planning to do to work with the vaccine-producing companies to deliver a corporately socially responsible approach that will seek Covid-19 vaccines provided worldwide? I will certainly come on to the details of that. It is the bulk of the speech, so I will not respond to your particular intervention, but I will tell you what we are doing. Alongside public health professionals, the continued work of the academics to sequence and share data on the virus will be absolutely pivotal to enabling us to respond to new variants that might escape the protection that is afforded by existing vaccines. I also recognise the important work that many Scottish charities are doing. In particular, members of the People's Vaccine Alliance have worked so hard to ensure that vaccine equity remains really high in our agenda. Further, I commend the monumental efforts of vaccinators and public health professionals in the delivery of Scotland's largest ever vaccination programme and the solidarity of the people of Scotland in rolling up their sleeves to participate in that achievement. It really has felt like a national effort. As a global citizen, in the Scottish Government, we are committed to international solidarity, not just in response to Covid-19 but in tackling other shared global challenges, including poverty, injustice and inequality. So far, we have allocated £3.5 million of our international development budget to support the Covid-19 response within our partner countries of Malawi, Rwanda, Zambia and Pakistan. We have provided funding to support vaccine preparedness and delivery, including £2 million to UNICEF to help with vaccine distribution and rollout and online healthcare education. We are also committing a further £1.5 million from our international development fund this financial year specifically for initiatives responding to Covid-19 in Malawi, Rwanda and Zambia. Our international development work continues to support those most vulnerable to the impacts of Covid-19, including women and girls through a new equalities programme. The UK's participation in Covid-19 is an important step in helping other nations to access Covid-19 vaccines, but the initial aim of making 2 billion doses available by the end of 2021 is likely to be missed. Demand for Covid-19 vaccines will continue to outstrip supply, and, as of 14 December 2021, only 7.2 per cent of people in low-income countries had received at least one dose. Further, covax is not designed to build and expand vaccine production capacity. As members are aware, on 9 December 2021, First Minister urged the Prime Minister to support a temporary waiver under the World Trade Organization's agreement on trade-related aspects of international property rights for Covid-19 vaccines. The waiver is one measure that would help to facilitate critical access to patents, technology and know-how. It would enable global expansion of vaccine manufacture and distribution, including in low and middle-income countries. Increasing global manufacturing capacity will benefit all countries and provide additional, much-needed supply chain resilience. There is also an important step towards building a local capacity and know-how here in Scotland, which will be invaluable for future pandemics. I wonder if the minister could address the issue of the vaccine manufacturing innovation centre sale in Oxfordshire. That was highlighted as a major opportunity to ensure that the Government-sponsored vaccine manufacturing capacity was a vital component of the UK's preparedness for future pandemics. That is now going to be lost. Could the minister address what could potentially be done in Scotland to develop an equivalent capability? Minister, I'm happy to give you back time for both of those interventions. Thank you. You'll know my colleague Ivan McKee works really closely with the life sciences industry. I, too, sit on a group with the life scientists industry. We are very keen to build capacity to rise to all of the challenges, so we did great work in terms of ensuring that PPE could be manufactured and produced in Scotland at the start of the pandemic, when there was a global shortage. We are keen to do the same for every aspect that we might need in the future. In terms of vaccine manufacturing, testing facilities and the know-how for genomic sequencing, all of those things are on our radar because we recognise how much work needs to be prepared for the next pandemic. The World Health Organization's Covid-19 technology access pool, or Ctap, has an important part to play in that. Ctap provides a platform for developers of Covid-19 vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics and other health products to share their intellectual property knowledge and data with quality-assured manufacturers around the globe. That enables manufacturers that have additional capacity to produce the high-quality tools that we need to tackle Covid-19 effectively, efficiently and equitably. Contributions to the pool are voluntary, and I commend all manufacturers that decide to share their intellectual property in this way. We recognise that the decision on a trips waiver is a reserved matter, but we will continue to urge the UK Government to join the more than 100 countries who are supportive of this measure. In closing, enabling equitable access to safe and effective vaccines is essential to ensure that as many people as possible are protected as quickly as possible. That will be critical to ending the pandemic and bolstering global health security. In action in this regard would contradict Scotland's commitments to international solidarity. Moreover, as others have said, allowing the virus to continue to circulate and further mutate would likely be epidemiologically self-defeating and undermine the monumental progress on vaccination made to date. We are committed to enabling greater vaccine equality. We will continue to urge action by the UK Government on reserved matters and we will continue to take action to deliver impact through our life-saving international development work.