The Long Shot: The Inside Story of the Race to Vaccinate Britain

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In the seven months in 2020 that she spent as the unpaid head of the UK vaccine task force Kate Bingham moved mountains. Although the first contracts for the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine had already been signed and work was underway on dozens of others in several countries, the almost unparalleled nature of the pandemic emergency required something else — an ability to put it all together and make it happen.

While certain individuals excelled and many more worked hard, “process apparently mattered more than outcomes” among civil servants, the Cabinet Office was the “bane of our existence”, and communications teams were “irresponsible… unfocused and patchily competent”. The 56-year-old hopes that her book – which she co-wrote with Dr Tim Hames, a journalist, academic and former director general of the British Venture Capital Association – will help spur change. None of it was inevitable… the biggest risk was whether or not it was even doable [to develop Covid vaccines],” she says. “But within Government, it also felt like we were just pushing water uphill the whole time.” Points of pride I came away buzzing and reassured that we still have in this century a wide ranging community fascinated not just by famous authors (I’ve rarely seen so many concentrated in one place) but by challenging ideas and questions.Then one day, when he came to do the windows, he asked ‘can I say something?’ I said yes of course. And he just replied ‘f---ing good job’. And I just thought that was the best thing ever.” I knew if he [Sykes] didn’t think much about any aspect of our operation, then he’d say so – loudly. Conversely, a seal of approval from him would be as close as I could get to acquiring body armour,” she wrote. Sykes’s review approved of the taskforce’s work in July 2020. This is a scary, engaging, no holds bar account of the project to identify and introduce the Covid-19 vaccine. When I observed that it would be a miracle if we received 30m AstraZeneca doses by Christmas, Matt simply snapped. He kept being told by experts that things were impossible, he said, only to find out later that they were perfectly possible if enough effort was made.

their intelligence – this makes a huge difference for a speaker. In the Oxford audience I encountered many experts in the field my book covered and even one of the ambassadors I’d quoted What is crazy is that all this manufacturing side is massively economically beneficial,” says Bingham. “We’re really good at advanced manufacturing, we’ve invested in the skills to do it… so why wouldn’t you lean into that? It’s a missed opportunity, and it could really provide economic growth.” Ah ha! That was fun,” she says, a glint in her piercing blue eyes. “We signed the world’s first contract with Pfizer-BioNTech… and it showed Whitehall could work at speed.”

It was literally nonsense,” she says. “It was obviously just ‘the process’… the fact that it was b------s going in, and whoever was reading it didn’t understand it, didn’t seem to matter. This was common – there was basically a lot of paper pushing, and people taking up a lot of time without achieving anything.” We failed to meet goal three: to build permanent pandemic capabilities in the UK,” she writes. “Not only are we vulnerable from a pandemic supply perspective, we have also lost an attractive economic opportunity.” Tom Crewe, Maddie Mortimer, Aidan Cottrell-Boyce and Santanu Bhattacharya Chaired by Matthew Stadlen New Writers of Fiction Trinity College: Garden Room Levine Building 4:00pm Fri 31 Friday, 31 March 2023 See this event The vaccine effort was a massive success and a huge team effort from the NHS to the vaccine taskforce, Oxford University to AstraZeneca. Matt is proud that he insisted that everyone across the UK had access to a vaccine, and is delighted the vaccine programme got the UK out of the pandemic ahead of almost everywhere else in the world. Often as an author, I only occasionally get to meet the public who buy and read my books. The Oxford Literary Festival was a special opportunity for me and certainly one of the highlights of my career – it was an honour I will never forget.

Italian Dinner Celebrating the Programme of Italian Literature and Culture SOLD OUT Exeter College: Hall 7:15pm Fri 31 Friday, 31 March 2023 See this eventMeanwhile there was a “near total ignorance” about what vaccine manufacturing actually entailed, and a National Audit Office’s investigation that began just two months after the VTF launched was a “foolish and expensive joke”, which wasted time and resources. Brutal critique For years in Wales, we’ve had a really lovely man who comes and cleans our windows,” she says. “He’s done this for years and is very good at it… but he’s never really said anything to me before. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. But it wasn’t until the summer of 2020 – when Bingham attended her first meeting in Downing Street, that she realised just how much the hierarchical, bureaucratic system could obfuscate work.

I loved the whole atmosphere of the Oxford Literary Festival. From breakfast, alongside some of the attendees, who were talking books with each other a mile a minute, to the public event at The Sheldonian where everyone was lively and engaged – I felt I had arrived in a kind of literary heaven. An excellent read… Capturing the exceptional pace and energy of everyone involved in discovering and producing effective therapies against Covid-19. All in all, this is a book I will treasure.' Kate Bingham’s new book, The Long Shot, is a gripping account of the UK Government Vaccine Task Force’s response to the pandemic by a remarkable, determined, thoughtful, and practical individual who was at the heart of the critical decisions that had to be made. I spoke with her frequently through 2020 as we battled logistical headwinds and the media storms in development of the Oxford vaccine and was always better for our chats, absorbing the positive energy that she emanates and benefiting from her wisdom. Her clarity of thought and action in a such a dark and turbulent time is a seam running through the book, and I know for certain that her efforts saved many lives. But I have to disagree with the title, because the book shows that it really wasn’t such a "long shot" with Kate at the helm.' Bingham’s husband is Jesse Norman MP, then the financial secretary to the Treasury. Bingham has no difficulty demonstrating that this has nothing to do with anything, but that didn’t stop the Guardian’s jibes, its “chumocracy” tables and the rest.Bingham and Hames’s accessible, edge-of-the-seat account of how British innovators vaccinated the UK and much of the rest of the world is also a quiet, compelling, non-partisan argument for dialogue between business and politics.'