The government's decision to "mothball" a vaccine manufacturing centre has been described as a "mistake".
The £200 million Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre was set up in 2017 in Harwell, Oxfordshire, as a not-for-profit company.
Its purpose was to bring together vaccine research and manufacturing.
Later, in 2022, the centre was sold before its construction was completed to US-based company Catelant.
Critics were apprehensive about selling the institution to a profit-making firm.
Catelant later announced it was delaying the project, leading to fears about the UK’s future vaccine-manufacturing capabilities.
Former industry adviser at the UK’s vaccine taskforce, Ian McCubbin, said to the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee: "I think (mothballing) it probably was a mistake, but the reason I think it was sold was the facility had got bigger."
He added: "What do you do with a facility that’s expensive to run but you’re actually not doing anything (for) a pandemic?
"If that facility was in place, not only physically we’d be able to do more work, but it would have a nucleus around which other expertise could gather and I could not overestimate how important that is in a community to make things work."
He concluded: "So, from a straightforward pandemic preparedness point of view, that is a mistake."
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