The Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre (VMIC)—the UK’s first strategic vaccine development and advanced manufacturing facility—is up for sale. Presently, the VMIC exists as a not for profit company in which a consortium of public universities—University of Oxford, Imperial College, and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine—are shareholders. Unless this privatisation is stopped, yet another crucial health asset could soon be siphoned out of public hands and into the hands of a profit-hungry private company under the radar and out of the public gaze.

The VMIC was founded in 2018 with £200 million of public money. Its own website states that it was formed ‘with the purpose of creating a national capability for vaccine development and manufacturing in the UK’. Naturally, it would go on to become a crucial public asset in the UK’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The VMIC played a key role in the development of the UK’s vaccine programme—not least in the manufacture of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. At its core, the centre is designed to enable the UK to effectively prepare for future pandemics, to develop vaccines, and—crucially, as we have seen—to manufacture them.

Such a centre sitting in public hands is integral to its potential and to its success. Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, we have seen two recurring themes. First, the elements of the response outsourced to the private sector have led disaster after disaster, with public money leaking out of the system and into the pockets of shareholders. Second, when driven by public investment and managed by the public sector, we have seen a proper, effective response.

One has only to look at the catastrophe that was the government’s contact tracing system—where the likes of Serco and Sitel pocketed millions while the system was on its knees—to see the non-stop disaster of privatising healthcare and public health. You could also look to the privatised NHS Supply Chain, which saw healthcare workers operating with insufficient and inadequate PPE at the height of the first wave of the virus. Or indeed the multitude of absurd contracts doled out to the friends of Tory MPs—from pest controllers to jewellery dealers to pub landlords—contracts that never delivered on what was promised. The list of failures goes on and on.

It stands to reason that putting an asset like the VMIC into private hands would deliver similar results. Why? Because the minute an institution designed to provide a public service is taken out of public ownership and placed in the private sector, its very nature and purpose is altered. In public hands, an institution like the VMIC has a sole purpose—to deliver on healthcare objectives, to provide public service, and to protect people’s health and wellbeing. In private hands, those purposes may still be present, but they are and always will be subservient to the bottom line of the company in question, and to the demands of profit. Do we expect a privately-run VMIC to pursue cutting edge medical development knowing that quicker and bigger profits can be made elsewhere? Do we expect it to enable equitable vaccine distribution when there’s more money on offer if mark-ups are higher when prices are ramped up for countries most in need?

The reality is that if the VMIC is sold, the bottom line of private companies put above public health, drives for innovation will be replaced with drives for profits, and we will see a significant reduction in our preparedness for future pandemics. Such a move would be calamitous, and anyone with an understanding of healthcare, or any memory of the past two years of pandemic management, would recognise that. No wonder then that health experts have indeed come out to oppose its sale. In February, five leading academics wrote in the British Medical Journal that privatising the VMIC is ‘difficult to justify on strategic, public health, economic, or reputational grounds’, and that ‘it would be foolhardy to proceed with it’.

Despite this—and despite the major national ramifications—the sale of the VMIC has taken place with limited public accountability, beyond the work of a small number of dedicated journalists and campaigners. That ought to change—and fast—because time to prevent this sale is running out. According to the BBC, the sale could take place as early as this month, and there is now only a single company in discussions to purchase the centre.

It was timely, therefore, that Oxford City Council voted unanimously this week to condemn and oppose the sale of the VMIC, following campaigning from We Own It, Keep Our NHS Public, the Socialist Health Association, and others. While having no formal role in the process, Oxford City Council is nonetheless an important stakeholder, given the centre’s location in Harwell, Oxfordshire, and will now be applying its institutional leverage to pressure the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Kwasi Kwarteng and the consortium of universities to stop the sale.

The passing of this motion has triggered a flurry of media coverage on the sale, and happened concurrently with a public mobilisation in Oxford itself. Now that mobilisation needs to ramp up. We need more people adding their names in opposition to the sale. We need more institutions to use their leverage to push for this privatisation to be blocked. And more than anything, we need to keep the VMIC in public hands.