Relationships within Government were also, at points, strained. Lee Cain, former Downing Street director of communications, “briefed against” Bingham in the newspapers and banned her from speaking to the media when she was publicising the Vaccine Registry. A managing partner at venture capital firm SV Health Investors, Bingham was hailed for her work in making sure that the UK was speedily supplied with ample doses of Covid vaccines in the middle of the pandemic. Her book, The Long Shot, is out next week with proceeds going to charity. 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.

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.” 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 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.” How Covid-19 vaccines went from the laboratory to people’s arms – the inside story of an extraordinary national campaign against all odds 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.”Meanwhile 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 He started by suddenly saying he couldn’t understand why I thought people his age – namely mid-40s – wouldn’t want, or indeed demand, a Covid vaccine for themselves,” she wrote.

She was leading a team of experts who would find Covid vaccines that worked, ensure they could be manufactured at scale and then delivered into people’s arms by the end of the year. He also knew that he’d always win in a verbal punch-up with the mild-mannered Alok Sharma, who was nowhere near as aggressive – and certainly insufficiently devious to take on the health secretary,” she wrote. 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. But on occasion, something happens that reminds her of the seven-month stint in the trenches of the Government’s Covid response, the remarkable feat of pulling off the impossible – and her new position as a reluctant pandemic celebrity. Britain’s internationally celebrated vaccine development and production regime was set in motion, from something like a standing start, by a team that included a bomb disposal expert, an Indian rowing star, an Italian consultant, a former ambassador, a football pundit, and the redoubtable Ruth Todd, whose day job was to see that submarines were delivered on time. This is a book about the skills and experiences necessary to build extraordinary ventures under pressure. Although the science is sketched ably enough here and there, this is not a science book.Despite drawing up an initial terms sheet with AstraZeneca for a drug now used in at least 30 countries, the UK chose neither to buy nor to invest in facilities to manufacture antibody treatments.

Bingham tapers off, before adding: “In hindsight, I should have pushed harder on some of the fights.” As governments across the world were scrambling to jump to the front of the vaccine queue in July 2020, Kate Bingham’s phone pinged. 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. 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 On the other hand, those teams who were fully ready were anxious to make an impact. Bingham only found out about Oxford University’s non-profit vaccine partnership with AstraZeneca over the radio, and Pfizer, partnering with BioNTech, much preferred to throw its own money at things than rely on any taskforce handholding.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. Knowledge and power must meet. 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. Roger Highfield and Peter Coveney Chaired by Irene Tracey Vice-chancellor’s Interview. Virtual You: How Building Your Digital Twin Will Revolutionise Medicine Sheldonian Theatre 12:00pm Fri 31 Friday, 31 March 2023 See this event