The vaccine race: it was Brexit and Bingham what won it.
There were good reasons for any member of the Tory Government to feel apprehensive on the morning of December 8, 2020, round about breakfast time, when I visited Guy’s Hospital in Southwark, South London.
In so far as we had made mistakes in the fight against Covid, they were my mistakes, since I had ultimate authority over every decision. In so far as there had been unnecessary death and suffering, it was my responsibility – and so there was something remarkable about this visit. No one swore at me under their breath, or catcalled from the coffee shop.
No one even gave me the hairy eyeball. Perhaps it was because everybody knew – it was all over the news – that on this day our country was making history.
Kate Bingham, who chaired the Vaccine Taskforce, secured the supply of immunisation jabs for Britain
A nurse gives Boris his Covid vaccine at London’s St Thomas’ Hospital in March 2021
We stood at a respectful distance, sleeves rolled up, ties tucked into our shirt buttons, as we watched 81-year-old Lyn Wheeler get her Covid vaccine. She wasn’t the very first in the world: that had been a 90-year-old at a hospital in Coventry, at 6.31 on the same morning. But she was one of the first. This church-going school assistant was getting a vaccination that was both licensed and effective. ‘I am doing it for Britain,’ she said.
I was overwhelmed with excitement. I was also, frankly, amazed.
As far as I knew, it took about ten to 15 years to bring a vaccine to market, and even then the chances were that it might not really work. I couldn’t see why we would have a vaccine in five years, let alone in one.
But one day in April, while I was sitting reading in Chequers, not long after getting out of hospital, I heard from my private office that a team at Oxford had made some sort of breakthrough.
It appeared that they were using chimpanzee flu, or adenovirus, to mimic the Covid virus, so that if your body were exposed to this bug via a vaccine, you would develop antibodies against Covid.
It all sounded promising, but still a long way off.
When I got back to the office at the end of the month, I found some people – such as my health adviser Will Warr – full of enthusiasm for the Oxford project. But they were worried. We had committed £65 million to support the creation of the vaccine, yet the intellectual property belonged to Oxford.
Now that the scientists, led by Sarah Gilbert, had made their breakthrough, they needed a commercial partner to bring it to market.
They were about to do a deal with Merck, the pharmaceutical giant. Which was great, except that Merck was American. That was a worry.
It wasn’t about nationalism, or chauvinism, or some political desire to have a Union Jack on a British breakthrough. We had a hard-nosed, practical concern that in these desperate times any government – our own included – would do whatever it took to ensure that their own people had a supply of vaccines, if and when they became available.
With the encouragement of Will Warr and Patrick Vallance, I wrote a letter addressed to both Oxford chancellor Chris Patten and the vice-chancellor, Louise Richardson. I delicately reminded them of the situation: of the long-standing UK government support for the Oxford researches into vaccines, and expressed the strong preference that they should seek another suitor.
Boris speaks to 81-year-old Lyn Wheeler, one of the first in the world to get her Covid vaccine, at London’s Guy’s Hospital in December 2020
He gives the thumbs-up to the vaccination programme after receiving his own jab at St Thomas’ Hospital
They took the hint. It wasn’t long before Pascal Soriot and AstraZeneca stepped forward; a contract was signed, and the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine was born.
That step – securing the vaccine supply before it even existed – was crucial. It is a very sad thing, but the whole experience of Covid so far had taught me that when national politicians panic, international co-operation goes out of the window.
What we needed was a tsar or tsarina who could take charge of the project, someone hustling, negotiating, talking to Big Pharma.
I chose Kate Bingham, whom I had known since I was 18. She was one of a bevy of brilliant and energetic Paulinas (alumnae of the Girls’ School in Hammersmith, West London) who went around Oxford in the mid-1980s, terrorising and breaking the hearts of their male counterparts.
She had married an old school friend of mine, Jesse Norman, and she had also been at school with my sister, the ubiquitous Rachel.
Yes, she was a chum of mine, but it was precisely because I knew her that I knew she was superabundantly qualified for the job. Her paper qualifications were perfect because she had built a career and reputation by investing in new medicines; and she had exactly the right leadership qualities. Britain ended up having the edge over other countries because Kate knew all the players in the life sciences sector.
She also did deals as fast as she could, and, with my explicit approval, she was pretty lavish in placing her bets on six different vaccines and a total of about 350 million doses – far more than would be needed by the entire UK population.
She certainly spent public money, and thank goodness for her decisiveness in doing so; because, as an outlay, it was utterly dwarfed by the costs of the disease.
Just as it looked, kerchingeroo, as if Kate’s bets might actually pay off, spectacularly, the Left decided to lay into her.
There was innuendo about her business connections, and the implication that she might be somehow profiting personally from her work on vaccines – an absurd suggestion, not least since she was leading the taskforce pro bono.
Another article complained she had spent £670,000 on PR consultants, which was a travesty because it was crucial to gauge public sentiment about vaccines given the challenges we were to face in the subsequent roll-out.
The BBC joined the hue and cry, claiming that Kate had only got the job because she was a chum of mine and asking if she was an example of the new corruption in public life.
Labour piled in – first Jon Ashworth, then Rachel Reeves, then Keir Starmer himself – as a way of getting at me.
It wasn’t long before they had egg on their face.
On December 2, Britain became the first country in the world to approve an effective vaccine, in Pfizer BioNTech, and a few days later we were the first country to begin the roll-out – as I saw at Guy’s in Southwark.
By the end of the month, we had become the first country in the world to approve the use of Oxford AstraZeneca, and unlike Pfizer (which required quite cold refrigeration) Astra could be stored at room temperature.
The roll-out rolled on with ever-faster revolutions; because Kate had laid on the stocks, and because the approvals came faster than anywhere else in the world. And that was thanks in no small part to Brexit.
I believe there were grave defects of the previous approach to Brexit, under the government of Theresa May.
It is true that her ‘deal’ kept us ‘closer’ to the EU, but it also meant a kind of subordination to Brussels.
By effectively remaining in the EU single market, we were out of the EU but run by the EU. Under Theresa’s deal, we remained as paid-up members of EU single market institutions, such as the European Medicines Agency (EMA).
Under my deal, we came out. We took back control. That meant that when it came to the approval of vaccines, we no longer had to go at the pace of the rest of the European Union. We had our own agency – the Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency – and we could do our own thing.
The result was that we approved these drugs weeks and weeks before anyone else.
That mattered. With more than 1,000 people dying on some of our worst days, even as the roll-out began – 1,342 on January 19, 2021, the direst day of the pandemic – the exact speed of our roll-out, in those few weeks, mattered more than anything else in the life of our nation.
It meant, bluntly, that we were able to immunise huge numbers of elderly and vulnerable people who – if they had been living in an EU country, or in pre-Brexit Britain – would unquestionably have been forced to wait for EMA approval for their drugs, and who might therefore have died of Covid.
It wasn’t long before some graffiti appeared on the wall in Portobello Road, West London.
‘Brexit saves lives,’ it said.
It wasn’t the sort of writing you expect on the wall in the largely Remain-backing Kensington and Chelsea, and I know that some of you will still find it a pretty indigestible assertion. But painful as it may be for some people, it’s true.
If you want proof, look at the reaction of our continental friends and partners. It wasn’t long before the success of the UK vaccine roll-out had started to drive them potty, first with irritation, then with rage.
