Almost every human crisis produces advances in human innovation, and the covid crisis has been no exception. We have seen in the UK what collaboration between academia and the private sector has done in terms of vaccine production. The mRNA vaccines may turn out to be as important as antibiotics in dealing with global disease outbreaks. As soon as we are able to identify the genome of a virus, we will be able to move to rapid vaccine production—something we were unable to do before. What can we in the UK do with our leadership of the G7 and our membership of the G20 and other international organisations to determine global protocols to enable us to be able to move forward in any future pandemic in a less chaotic way than we did on this occasion and to be able to develop global capacity for vaccine productions? Surely if anything is a long-term and valuable legacy of global Britain, it will be this.
My right hon. Friend, who is also a doctor, is completely right: necessity is the mother of invention. We have been driven by the pandemic to great, great feats of scientific genius, producing, as he rightly says, the mRNA vaccines at incredible speed—the AstraZeneca vaccine—and the pandemic has meant that the abilities of this country alone to cope have hugely increased. We are now capable of producing a vaccine through the fill and finish plants. We have the new Vaccines Manufacturing and Innovation Centre. We have invested in bioreactors across the country. We are much, much more resilient than we were, but we are also leading across the world in making sure that countries co-ordinate and work together on spotting zoonotic diseases earlier, with the research hubs, and making sure that we co-ordinate data and share data much earlier. We are also making sure that there are not the barriers that have, sadly, sprung up between countries to the sharing of supplies and vaccines, so that we have secure supply chains around the world. So what the UK is doing is not only spending £548 million on COVAX, investing in vaccines around the world—I think that the UK has so far given 40 million vaccine doses to 117 countries—but working on a global response to pandemics. That will be one of the things we will do together at the G7, and it is supported by all the partner countries. So that is what we will be doing.