“She wanted my contacts. She knew I knew everyone in the industry,” Bates, a lobbyist who leads the UK BioIndustry Association, told CNN. Kate Bingham said to me, ‘We’ve never made a vaccine that works against the human coronavirus. This is a long shot.’
Forced by a sense of national duty in times of crisis, Bates agreed to suspend his day job. The position was unpaid.
By this time, the UK government had one of the highest national death tolls in the world, dragging its feet to impose lockdown restrictions, showing reluctance to enforce rules, and after unsuccessful efforts to detect the spread of the virus and track down. The border was also still wide open, and the government was throwing money at a varying group of private sector advisers to secure basic personal protection equipment (PPE) – an effort that seemed to be more successful in causing controversy than securing supplies. .
But the government’s foresight in supporting coronavirus vaccines has become one of the pandemic’s most surprising success stories.
Nadhim Zahawi, the UK’s minister for the deployment of Covid-19 vaccines, confirmed the target had been reached a day earlier in a Twitter message on Sunday. “We will not rest until we offer the vaccine to all of Phase 1,” Zahawi wrote, referring to the priority groups established by the government.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson celebrated the moment, calling it an “important milestone” and an “extraordinary achievement”.
“In England, I can now tell you that we have now offered injections to everyone in the first four priority groups, the people most likely to be seriously ill from the Coronavirus and have reached the first target we set ourselves,” he wrote. Twitter.
The UK government also plans to give a first dose to the remaining at-risk groups and adults over 50 by the end of April.
Across the country, football stadiums, horse racing tracks, cathedrals and mosques are used as mass vaccination sites. And through the National Health Service (NHS), the government can reach almost any person in the country to schedule a vaccination appointment.
In the southern English town of Basingstoke, a working fire station is used for vaccinations. To make the program possible, engines have been moved outside, emergency routes have been revised and a small army of soldiers, firefighters, volunteers and nurses have been moved in.
“It feels like a war effort,” said Mark Maffey, the NHS architect who led the transformation of the fire station and three other vaccination sites in the area.
Big bets on ‘longshot’ vaccines
British chief science advisor Patrick Vallance was careful not to repeat his mistakes in purchasing personal protective equipment and was unwilling to rely solely on officials who had no expertise in vaccine procurement.
On paper, the unusual combination of government officials and current and former industry insiders seems like a recipe for conflict of interest, but they were accountable to ministers and government accountants, explains Bates, who left the committee last month.
The British-Swedish pharmaceutical company was chosen for its iron-clad commitment to prioritizing the UK market, which, according to both parties, meant that all doses made in the UK were given to the UK government and only exported doses once the land was delivered . In return, the UK government agreed to invest heavily in the production of the vaccine.
“I was not going to settle for a contract that would allow the Oxford vaccine to be delivered to others around the world ahead of us,” Health Minister Matt Hancock told British radio station LBC earlier this month.
Of the more than 100 vaccines currently in development worldwide, the task force shortlisted about 20 based on how quickly they could be tested and made available. In the end, they chose seven based on the makers’ ability to scale up production for the UK. Those seven include the three approved so far by Pfizer / BioNTech, Moderna and Oxford / AstraZeneca. Two others from Novavax and Johnson & Johnson have also shown promise in the Phase 3 studies published last month.
Bates says bureaucratic hoops were kept to a minimum. “I think having a small group makes decisions easier and faster,” he said, adding that Bingham “the hotline to the prime minister also ensured that chain of command was very short at key moments when decisions were made.”
Go alone
“That didn’t feel like the right thing to do, so the UK didn’t do it,” said Bates, estimating the decision, “probably giving us work at least three months in advance, which is proving invaluable.”
The UK’s decision not to participate in the European procurement strategy was controversial. Last March, Martin McKee, a European health professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, predicted in the Guardian newspaper that Britain would pay more and get fewer vaccines by going it alone.
“The timing of the pandemic … could provide an opportunity to consider whether an isolationist ideology is really such a good idea,” McKee wrote.
His opinion has since changed. “I completely admit that I was wrong here,” McKee told CNN. “I give Kate Bingham all the credit … she did very well.”
McKee believes the UK’s success is also due to its well-organized and centralized NHS system, which gives the country an advantage that many other countries lack. The Basingstoke Fire Station can inject more than 1,000 vaccine doses per day. Nationwide, the daily injections have once injected more than 600,000. NHS staff, emergency services and regular volunteers are all starting to pay off their efforts.
The firefighters now trained to fire in Basingstoke worked under the direction of Steve Apter, the deputy chief fire brigade for the County of Hampshire. Last summer, Apter’s mother was hospitalized with symptoms of Covid-19 and later died of pneumonia. Her test eventually came back negative, but her symptoms meant she was isolated for days and couldn’t have her family at her bedside.
“The feeling of helplessness was overwhelming,” he recalls. He is proud of how the fire service is contributing to the vaccination effort and cannot help but feel a sense of national pride.
“I have never experienced such an open sense of shared purpose as we see now.”
CNN’s Matt Brealey, Darren Bull and Mark Baron contributed to this report.