Miraculous vaccines have become a seasonal chore
In May 2020, Kate Bingham, the life sciences venture capitalist was asked to lead the UK government’s vaccine task force (VTF), although she believed a successful Covid-19 vaccine was the “longest of the long shots”, and was reluctant to take responsibility of potentially wasting large sums of public money by pursuing jabs that would almost certainly fail.
In two years, her team successfully ensured that the UK had the first approved shot in the west, and how odds were stacked against Kate Bingham’s success.
Covid-19 pandemic books so far had been about disastrous decisions by politicians, and scientist behind the winning vaccines and in Long Shot, Kate Bingham and Time Hames reveals the story inside the team that overnight became responsible for bridging the two.
The vaccine task force was an architect in luring vaccine makers to do early deals with the UK by offering large amounts of investment in trials and manufacturing and navigating a governing bureaucracy.
Bingham’s team took venture capital-style risks, with life and death stakes, although her husband was a Conservative minister at the time- she was not interested in politics.
Her team staffed with experts in bomb disposal and sub-marine procurement as well as health care ultimately backed the hairy, scary mRCA vaccines, which use gentle code to teach the immune system to recognise the virus, which was never successful before.
During the lockdown, Bingham’s family rides horses and bikes into Welsh hills to cook sausages on a battered frying pan, with porcini mushrooms, and celebrates the first approval by running with her negihbour’s sheepdog.
Bingham had to chastise then Health Secretary Matt Hancock for being two-faced, pleasant in private but berating him in front of Cabinet colleagues and rolling her eyes at Boris Johnson’s hungry obsession with getting a vaccine with a British flag on. She found to her horror the hypocrisy on a rare trip to 10 Downing Street to find their cavalier attitude to Covid and that they would not wear masks in meetings, although everyone in the country was ordered to do so.
Exasperated at Whitehall’s lack of flexible thinking and scientific understanding.
To buy vaccines they had to fill in procrustean business cases, making economic, commercial, financial, and management cases, but never the scientific ones.
She accuses political advisers of actively working to undermine her. Towards the end of her tenure, when she felt the proof of her success had become clear with the Pfizer vaccine approval, she found the media turning on her, accusing her of hiring a PR firm as if it were a personal vanity project when it had been charged with a campaign to recruit participants for the Covid-19 trial. Much of the briefing came from inside Downing Street, from advisers who failed to comprehend that she was trying to spread the word about vaccines, not promote herself.
With the Uk government in turmoil, this essential book may be most valuable as a fresh vision for how to lead in a crisis.
The Long Shot is a bible about the most successful procurement exercise ever.
The Long Shot: The Inside Story of the Race to Vaccinate Britain by Kate Bingham and Tim Hames, Oneworld £18.99, 336 pages.