“She wanted my contacts. She knew that I knew everyone in the industry,” Bates, a lobbyist who runs the UK Bioindustry Association, told CNN. “Kate Bingham said to me, ‘We never made a vaccine that would work against a human coronavirus. This is a long shot.'”
Driven by a sense of national duty in times of crisis, Bates agreed to suspend his daily work. The position was not paid.
At that time, the British government had one of the highest national death rates in the world, having dragged on to impose blocking restrictions, shown reluctance to enforce the rules and follow futile attempts to track and trace the spread of the virus. Its frontier was also open, and the government was throwing money at a rotating roster of private sector consultants to secure basic personal protective equipment (PPE) – an effort that seemed more successful in generating controversy than securing supplies.
But the government’s prediction to support coronavirus vaccines has become one of the pandemic’s most surprising success stories.
Nadhim Zahawi, the UK minister for implanting the Covid-19 vaccine, confirmed that the goal was reached a day earlier in a Twitter post on Sunday. “We are not going to rest until we offer the vaccine to the entire phase 1,” wrote Zahawi, referring to priority groups defined by the government.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson celebrated the moment, calling it a “significant milestone” and an “extraordinary achievement”.
“In England, I can say that we now offer jabs to all the first four priority groups, the people most likely to be seriously ill because of the Coronavirus, reaching the first target that we set for ourselves,” he wrote on Twitter.
The British government also plans to give a first dose to other risk groups and adults over 50 by the end of April.
Across the country, football stadiums, horse racing tracks, cathedrals and mosques are being used as mass vaccination sites. And through the National Health Service (NHS), the government can reach almost everyone in the country to schedule a vaccination appointment.
In the town of Basingstoke, in the south of England, a functioning fire department is being used for vaccination. To accommodate the program, engines were moved outdoors, emergency deployment routes were overhauled and a small army of soldiers, firefighters, volunteers and nurses was transferred.
“It looks like a war effort,” said Mark Maffey, the NHS architect who led the transformation of the fire department and three other vaccination sites in the area.
Big bets on ‘remote’ vaccines
Cautious not to repeat his mistakes in purchasing PPE and reluctant to trust only government officials who had no experience in purchasing vaccines, Britain’s chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, pressured Downing Street to bring in outside experts to form the force – vaccine task.
On paper, the unusual combination of public officials and current and former sector officials seems like a recipe for conflicts of interest, but they were accountable to government ministers and auditors, explains Bates, who left the committee last month.
The Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical company was chosen because of its firm commitment to prioritize the UK market, which, according to both parties, involved supplying the British government with all doses manufactured in the United Kingdom, and only exporting doses once the country had been provided. In return, the UK government agreed to invest heavily in the manufacture of the vaccine.
“I would not accept a contract that would allow the Oxford vaccine to be delivered to others around the world before us,” Health Secretary Matt Hancock told British radio LBC earlier this month.
Of the more than 100 vaccines in development worldwide at the time, the task force listed about 20 based on how quickly they could be tested and made available. Ultimately, they chose seven based on the manufacturers’ ability to increase production for the UK. These seven include the three that have been approved so far by Pfizer / BioNTech, Moderna and Oxford / AstraZeneca. Two others from Novavax and Johnson & Johnson also showed promise in the Phase 3 tests published last month.
Bates says that bureaucratic hoops have been reduced to a minimum. “I think having a small group makes decisions easier and faster,” he said, adding that Bingham “having the hotline to the Prime Minister also ensured that chains of command were very short at key times when decisions were made. sockets.”
Going alone
“It didn’t seem like the right thing to do, so the UK didn’t,” said Bates, estimating the decision “probably gave us at least three months of upfront work, which is proving invaluable.”
The UK’s decision not to adhere to Europe’s purchasing strategy was controversial. Last March, Martin McKee, a European professor of health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, predicted in the Guardian newspaper that Britain would pay more and receive fewer vaccines if it did everything on its own.
“The time of the pandemic … can provide an opportunity to reflect on whether an isolationist ideology is really a good idea,” wrote McKee.
His view has changed since then. “I totally admit I was wrong about that,” McKee told CNN. “I give all credit to Kate Bingham … she did very well.”
McKee believes the UK’s success is also due to the well-organized and centralized NHS system, which gives the country an advantage that many other countries lack. The fire department in Basingstoke is capable of injecting more than 1,000 doses of vaccine per day. Across the country, daily injections reached 600,000. NHS staff, emergency services and ordinary volunteers are all beginning to see their efforts rewarded.
Firefighters now trained to shoot Basingstoke work under Steve Apter, the Hampshire County Fire Department’s noncommissioned officer. Last summer, Apter’s mother was hospitalized with symptoms of Covid-19 and later died of pneumonia. Her test ended up being negative, but her symptoms left her isolated for days, unable to have her family beside her bed.
“The feeling of helplessness was overwhelming,” he recalled. He is proud of how the firefighters are contributing to the vaccination effort and cannot help feeling a sense of national pride as well.
“I have never experienced such an open sense of shared purpose as we are seeing now.”
CNN’s Matt Brealey, Darren Bull and Mark Baron contributed to this report.