Cuts to UK vaccine funding could lead to ‘huge numbers’ of child deaths overseas

Hundreds of thousands of children in the world’s poorest countries will die if the UK cuts back funding for a hugely effective vaccination programme as part of its significant reduction in overseas aid, the Guardian has been told.

According to data collated by the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (Gavi), to which the UK has previously been one of the main contributors, even a small cut in UK funding would be expected to result in millions fewer vaccinations, leading to huge numbers of preventable deaths.

The projections, put together by aid agencies based on Gavi’s records and seen by the Guardian, will place more pressure on the government over its plan to hugely reduce overseas aid, using the money to spend more on defence, after the resignation in protest on Friday of Anneliese Dodds, the international development minister.

It comes as the head of the British Council, which is partly financed from the aid budget, urged ministers to ensure they did not erode the UK’s diplomatic and cultural soft power.

The projections, dating from before the new cuts, calculated that even if the UK kept its contribution to Gavi steady, rather than a hoped-for increase of 10%, this would lead to the Geneva-based alliance vaccinating 8 million fewer children, about 200,000 of whom would subsequently die.

Aid agencies had expected the UK’s budget for Gavi to be cut even before Tuesday’s announcement on overseas aid, with the money used to spend more on defence. If it was to drop by 40%, the amount overall aid is falling, it would lead to many hundreds of thousands of otherwise preventable deaths.

The Foreign Office says no decision on specific programmes will be taken before next month’s spending review, and pointed to Keir Starmer’s pledge to particularly support vaccination efforts, as well as relief in areas such as Sudan and Gaza. However, aid officials are braced for a potentially significant cut.

While the reduction is from 0.5% of gross national income to 0.3% in 2027, given nearly a third of this is spent on housing asylum seekers in the UK, experts have said the amount spent overseas could end up being as little as 0.23%, the lowest proportion since records began.

This has caused particular alarm given it comes after Donald Trump in effect shut down the United States Agency for International Development (USAid), halting much of its own vaccination work.

The UK has given Gavi more than £2bn over the past four years. The US has also previously been a key funder, along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Aid campaigners argue it has proved to be hugely cost-effective in its work. Gavi’s statistics show that it has vaccinated more than 1.1 billion children across 78 countries in its 25 years of operation, preventing nearly 18m deaths.

“Reducing UK funding for Gavi would be fiscally easy, but disastrous,” one aid agency official said. “It would cost large numbers of lives – there is no way around that.”

A Gavi spokesperson said the alliance was “heartened” to hear Starmer mention vaccination as a priority.

They added: “While we appreciate the competing priorities every country is faced with, any cut to UK funding would have a disastrous effect on Gavi’s work supporting routine immunisation of more than half the world’s children, maintaining global stockpiles of vaccines against diseases like Ebola and cholera, reaching vulnerable communities in humanitarian contexts with vital services, and helping countries and the world quickly respond to outbreaks.”

Doing this would be “reversing years of progress, leaving the world less secure in face of inevitable future emergencies, and setting countries back on their pathway to self-sufficiency”, the spokesperson said.

Also at risk is the British Council, which warned last month it faced potential budget cuts of £250m, which would remove its presence in up to 40 countries, a legacy of commercial interest rates charged on Covid-era loans from the government.

Scott McDonald, the council’s chief executive, said while defence spending was needed, “we must not forget the importance of building alliances and global influence through soft power activity, which supports the UK’s security objectives, through which the British Council has a proven track record in countering disinformation, building media literacy and supporting cohesion”.

It was, he added, “critical that the simultaneous cuts to the aid budget are not delivered in a way that damages the UK’s reputation and soft power”.