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

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From a small cottage, Bingham juggled vaccine suppliers, Whitehall, the media circus – and her daughter’s exams. Political manoeuvring, miscommunications and administrative meddling nearly jeopardised the project. But perseverance paid off. 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.” 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. Abandoning the Vaccine Registry, where more than 500,000 people signed up to take part in clinical trials, was short sighted – Bingham wanted this resource to continue post-Covid. If there was another new pathogen lapping the globe, Bingham says she’d think twice before agreeing to lead a new VTF.

In an exclusive interview with The Telegraph ahead of the book’s launch on Thursday October 20, Bingham – who emerged from the pandemic with a Damehood after leading the UK’s drive to buy a broad portfolio of effective Covid jabs – laughs at the memory. When I arrived, there was an Excel spreadsheet that was being filled out twice a week by the guys in BEIS [the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, which hosted the VTF] to send to the Cabinet Office, so they ‘knew what we were doing’.We were relying on the likes of a bomb disposal experts, an Indian rowing star, an Italian consultant, a submarine delivery agent, a former ambassador, a football pundit and a venture capitalist to get the UK out of the pandemic,” Bingham jokes. Of course, many had other skills – the football pundit, for instance, happened to be Jonathan Van Tam. 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.' She stresses that the UK clearly has more manufacturing capacity than it did – the Government bought and repurposed a veterinary vaccine plant in Essex, for instance, while Moderna is setting up an mRNA vaccine manufacturing plant. Britain also invested in training, and expanded vaccine testing facilities at Porton Down. Elias Chacour Interviewed by Diarmaid MacCulloch A Palestinian Christian Working for Peace and Reconciliation in Israel CANCELLED Bodleian: Divinity School 2:00pm Fri 31 Friday, 31 March 2023 See this event

Meanwhile, cancelling the contract with Valneva just before its traditional jab was approved by UK regulators limited the diversity of Britain’s vaccine portfolio, undermined investment in a bioreactor plant in Scotland, damaged relations with industry, and limited global rollout. It was a privilege for me to visit the festival to receive the Bodley Medal. As an incidental blessing I saw Oxford at its most mysterious and atmospheric. It was a day of piercing cold and as I walked through the twilight from the Sheldonian to Christ Church, the streets were empty and the whole city was shutting itself away. Christ Church was silent except for the footfall of unseen persons around corners and the sounds of evensong creeping from behind closed doors. For the first time I understood thoroughly the power of college ghost stories.

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 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”.