Taking away and giving - we're not the only ones with COVID-19

After the heady and headline-grabbing political news of last week, I've noticed two hopeful pieces of news this week, which seem to have slipped by most media unremarked. One came in the shape of a speech on Tuesday; and the other was a comment on BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning. 

Andrew Mitchell MP

The first was a speech made by Andrew Mitchell MP for Sutton Coldfield (formerly International Development Secretary) in the House of Commons, introducing a private member's bill entitled "Doctors and Nurses (Developing Countries) Bill". The gist of his speech is "The case we make to Parliament and the Government today is as follows: it is immoral and selfish for Britain, with its wealth and infrastructure, to poach doctors from the developing world. However, by taking the action I have suggested, we can turn that into a win-win for us and for developing countries." When we persuade a doctor from the developing world to come here, we do so in the knowledge that our gain will inevitably be their country’s loss. In this country, we have 215 doctors, nurses, health workers and midwives from Sierra Leone; from Nigeria, 4,099; from Pakistan, 3,394; from Ghana, 1,118; and from India, just short of 20,000. He pointed out the disproportion of the ratios of doctors per head of population here compared to that in countries we import from, and "how much we rely on those doctors and nurses and other healthcare workers who bring their talents and skills to this country to support our NHS from overseas. We respect them and we are hugely grateful to them. Indeed, if I may use a second world war analogy, much beloved by some of my hon. Friends, the heroes of this war against covid are not, as in the battle of Britain, the men and women of the Royal Air Force but, all too often, workers from overseas working in our hospitals, giving their all in our care homes, putting themselves in harm’s way, and often living on the minimum wage." 

So he proposed, "Why not do the following? For every doctor or nurse we poach from a developing nation, we should ensure that that developing country—on losing their trained professional to our advantage—receives from the existing British development budget sufficient resources to train up and replace them, two for one? When we are lucky enough to secure such professionals from the developing world, we should replace them twice over, and expand their public health services accordingly." 

What a brilliantly simple idea! Undoubtedly we owe a debt of gratitude to the nations from whom we poach professionals to prop up our National Health Service. Undoubtedly it is immoral to rob the poor to enrich the wealthy. Remember David and Bathsheba - and Nathan's parable? We're in the same territory.

Prof Andrew Pollard

The other news came in an interview with Professor Andrew Pollard from the Oxford Vaccine Group. Nick Robinson was asking him about the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine. There's good news on that front as well as last week's from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna who seem to be in an efficacy arms race. The good news was that the Oxford vaccine seems to lose none of its effectiveness with us oldies; and moreover it's the vaccine in which the UK government has most heavily invested, having ordered 100 million doses. (Quite why the government wants a stockpile of 340 million doses, which it has ordered in total, even at two per person, with a population of 68 million beats me - maybe they intend to give the surplus away...) However the good news was that the Oxford vaccine unlike the BioNTech and Moderna equivalents does not require to be stored at temperatures more suited to the Arctic than the Tropics. "Right from the beginning our goal has been to develop a vaccine that could be distributed everywhere, and that's not a question just for the UK where of course we've got the infrastructure that can be put in place to manage whatever the storage requirements are, but we're looking globally. We really want to get to every corner of the world if indeed the vaccine is shown to work." As he implied later, if the virus persists in some parts of the world, the possibility of reinfection will always be there. 

How good it was to hear someone else looking beyond our shores and realising as Prince Charles remembered in Berlin on Sunday that no man and no country is really an island entire unto itself. Obversely how chilling to hear suggestions that the £16.5 billion defence budget increase might be at the expense of the overseas aid budget. I gather that the Treasury is trying to claw back some of the billions that have been splashed out on covid-related contracts from our overseas aid commitment of 0.7%. Tragic. 

A friend of mine commenting on Andrew Mitchell's proposal wrote, "This is what we ought to be doing and, if it happens, would make Britain truly great, and me proud to be British!" I agree.