In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, the author of the seminal 2016 AMR review, Lord O’Neill, expressed his dismay at the Government’s decision to axe the Fleming Fund. The peer stated that it would mean that the UK will no longer be viewed internationally as a reliable partner when tackling major global health challenges.
The Fleming Fund was a decade-long UK aid programme based in 25 Asian and African countries which aimed to gather and generate important data on AMR and encourage investment in combatting the issue.
The criticism follows a scathing National Audit Office (NAO) from February which claimed the UK was far from containing and controlling AMR, and noted that just one target of the 2019 National AMR Action Plan had been met.
Lord O’Neill supported the recommendations from our Community Diagnostics Consensus Statement in the House of Lords chamber earlier this year, asking the Minister if embedding diagnostics into community settings would help fight AMR, stimulate venture capital in diagnostic businesses and boost the economy and NHS productivity.
In his own Telegraph article, former Chancellor and Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt claims that the Fleming Fund cut represents a risk to the UK’s national security. He argues that, not only will the decision claim lives, but will erode GDP which could have spent on frontline NHS services.
Mr Hunt urges the Government to ‘step up’ on AMR and highlights that the absence of the programme ‘puts even greater pressure on UK government and the life sciences sector to find new ways to prepare for the pandemics we already detect and those we are yet to detect’.
