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

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Dame Kate Bingham served as the Chair of the UK Vaccine Taskforce, on a seven-month unpaid secondment, steering a team of experts to deliver the world’s fastest Covid-19 vaccination programme. He was a lecturer in Politics at Oxford University 1989–96, specialising in American and British Government. Johnson is benignly hands-off til he has to become positively hands-on in reigning in spinning misinformation about the VTF coming out of Number 10.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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.The Long Shot is published as readers appear to have tired of Covid-19 and the miraculous vaccines have become more of a seasonal chore.

It also demonstrates how science and the effective application of science are critical to solving the world’s problems, and that these solutions will only be delivered with a razor-sharp focus on outcomes rather than on following procedures. From a remote cottage, Bingham juggled vaccine suppliers, Whitehall, the media circus… as deaths mounted and the world shut down. 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. 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.From a cottage miles away from Westminster, Bingham juggled vaccine suppliers, Whitehall, the media circus – and her daughter’s exams. It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance.

An excellent read… Capturing the exceptional pace and energy of everyone involved in discovering and producing effective therapies against Covid-19. When we get past the introductory chapters, we get a really good insight into how by adopting a venture capitalist business type approach with a clear focus on outputs - in contrast to the Civil Service's focus on process – the vaccine task force was a success. 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.As an outsider rooted in business, she offers strong and specific recommendations for transforming government. The book warns this kind of success is not likely to be repeated without mass production facilities in Britain.