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

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Covid is still spreading, probably mutating and just waiting for the next advantageous circumstance to jump back into wider global populations. It appears that the Government has lost interest in both vaccines and pandemic preparedness, but it is also an example of the usual story of Government not learning from its mistakes. I sympathise greatly with her thoughts on the internal politics within HMG: private sector and public sector are like oil and water - they don't mix well.

No and the book argues that Britain will probably be less prepared than it was for the covid pandemic.Her clarity of thought and action in a such a dark and turbulent time is a seam running through the book, and I know for certain that her efforts saved many lives. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. From a cottage miles away from Westminster, Bingham juggled vaccine suppliers, Whitehall, the media circus - and her daughter's exams. The book warns this kind of success is not likely to be repeated without mass production facilities in Britain. Instead, they carried on with usual Government bureaucracy and inefficiency, with civil servants and politicians spending time protecting their 'fiefdoms' and promoting their own interests.

Good on her - success is not just about creating high performance teams, it is also about identifying and addressing hypocrisy and poor performance, and ultimately punishing failure. The author warns that information spinners are a vast workforce in Whitehall; they are numerous and expensive and an absolute drag on efficiency and exist to spread misinformation if that suits the political purposes of the departments in which they reside.

Bingham’s eclectic team secured the first vaccine doses administered in the West, saving thousands of lives in the UK as new variants struck. SV’s investments have led to the launch of twenty drugs for inflammatory and autoimmune disease, blindness and cancer. It is also a fascinating insight into dysfunctionality in the Government and exposes how even in a time of national emergency the Civil Service and politicians couldn't step up to the plate. As an outsider rooted in business, she offers strong and specific recommendations for transforming government.

From a cottage miles away from Westminster, Bingham juggled vaccine suppliers, Whitehall, the media circus – and her daughter’s exams.Catapulted into a national crisis, Bingham’s eclectic team secured the first vaccine doses administered in the West and saved thousands of lives in the UK as new variants struck.

This is the insider view into how the Vaccine Taskforce beat those long odds and delivered a scientific miracle. 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. A blueprint of how industry, academia and government can work together to address a question of global importance, with lessons for other future crises. Of course, having a working vaccine is only part of the story, it also has to be manufactured and administered which presented their own challenges as described by Bingham.

With the revelations concerning partygate and other scandals it does make one question what sort of the administration Johnson was running in No 10. She is Managing Partner at life sciences venture capital firm SV Health Investors where she co-leads SV’s biotech franchise which has a long history of developing transformational new medicines. Now, nearly every adult in Britain has had the jab, lockdowns have ended and we can finally live with Covid.