Responding to today’s health and social care committee report, vaccine access campaigners have said “the failure of the government’s response to Covid-19 is not limited to the UK, it has also been an international disaster.”

Global Justice Now is bringing coffins to Whitehall today “so the Prime Minister understands his complicity in the death toll globally, as well as in the UK”, in a “day of shame” organised with STOPAIDS, Just Treatment, and Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM). The groups are members of the People’s Vaccine Alliance.

They will carry coffins down Whitehall in a funeral procession from Parliament Square at 17:20, past Downing Street and the Foreign Office. In Edinburgh, outside the British government’s Scotland office, protestors in funeral attire will hold a white flower wreath reading ‘Shame’.

For more than a year the UK has blocked attempts to allow low and middle-income countries to manufacture their own vaccines by waiving intellectual property rules

3.5 million people have died since India and South Africa proposed the waiver at the World Trade Organisation last October, averaging more than 10,000 deaths a day.

The UK has vaccinated more people than 132 countries combined, totaling 45.05 million people from a population of 68.2 million, compared to a total of 44.2 million from 132 countries with a combined population of more than one billion.

Countries collectively representing 13% of the world’s population lag behind the UK, including Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Afghanistan, Angola, Mozambique, Ghana, Yemen, Madagascar, Cameroon, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, Malawi, and Zambia. Many have vaccination rates of less than 2%.

Tim Bierley, pharma campaigner at Global Justice Now, said:

“The failure of the government’s response to Covid-19 is not limited to the UK, it has also been an international disaster. Millions have died while ministers have blocked efforts to allow low-and-middle-income countries to produce vaccines. That should be a mark of shame.

“Britain has hoarded so many doses that it has vaccinated more people than 130 countries combined, all while obstructing negotiations to waive intellectual property on Covid vaccines, which this report fails to condemn.

“Today, we’re bringing coffins to Whitehall so the Prime Minister understands his complicity in the death toll globally, as well as in the UK. There is no bringing back those we have lost, but millions more could be saved if he chooses to act.”