The Long Shot — Kate Bingham on Britain’s Covid vaccine rollout

When Kate Bingham was first asked to lead the UK government’s vaccine task force (VTF), her instinct was to refuse. The no-nonsense life sciences venture capitalist was reluctant to take responsibility for potentially “wasting” a vast amount of public money by pursuing jabs that would almost certainly fail.

In May 2020, Bingham believed a successful Covid-19 vaccine was “the longest of long shots”. Yet in the two years since her team ensured that the UK had the first approved shot in the west, we have swiftly forgotten how precipitously the odds were stacked against success.

So far, pandemic books have been split into two camps: tales of the triumphant scientists behind the winning vaccines, and accounts of the disastrous decisions made by politicians. In The Long Shot, Bingham and her co-author Tim Hames take us inside the team that overnight became responsible for bridging the two.

The vaccine task force placed big bets on unproven shots, luring vaccine makers to do early deals with the UK by offering investment in trials and manufacturing, and navigating a governing bureaucracy so detached from reality that Bingham at times felt that it was “an Alice in Wonderland situation, with more than a hint of Monty Python”. 

She paints a sympathetic picture of a bewildered outsider — but neglects the costly PPE contracts that critics deemed highly questionable

The Long Shot is a book about procurement — not normally a subject for a gripping tale. Yet in this case we are dealing with the most successful procurement exercise of our times. And luckily, Bingham delivers on her punchy promise in the prologue to “tell it like it is”. As an outsider rooted in business, she offers strong and specific recommendations for transforming government. Most deliciously, she names.

The first two-thirds of this pacy memoir show how Bingham’s team took venture capital-style risks, with life and death stakes. Bingham was not an expert in vaccines, and, she insists — despite her husband being a Conservative minister at the time — is uninterested in politics.

She was, however, “entirely comfortable with risk, and risk would be the VTF’s oxygen”. Her team, staffed with experts in bomb disposal and submarine procurement as well as healthcare, achieved wonders. Most notably, they backed the “hairy, scary, sexy” mRNA vaccines, which use genetic code to teach the immune system to recognise the virus, but had never been successful before.

In between the stories of making big bets over Zoom, we glimpse the rest of Bingham’s lockdown life, straight out of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons. Her family ride horses and bikes into the Welsh hills to cook sausages on a battered old frying pan, she slips out one afternoon to hunt for porcini mushrooms, and she celebrates the first emergency approval with a run with her neighbour’s sheepdog.

Initially, there are only hints of how the government got in the way. She chastises the then health secretary Matt Hancock for being “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”: pleasant in private, but berating her in front of Cabinet colleagues. She rolls her eyes at Boris Johnson’s obsession with getting a vaccine with a British flag on. And she describes her horror on a rare trip to 10 Downing Street to find that they would not wear masks in meetings. We now know that this was just one example of a cavalier attitude to Covid.

But her frustration builds. Exasperated at Whitehall’s lack of scientific understanding or flexible thinking during the crisis, she complains of not only building the plane while flying it, but also “fielding endless petty questions from air traffic control asking about the strength of the orange juice we were serving to passengers”. To buy vaccines, they had to fill in “procrustean” business cases, making the strategic, economic, commercial, financial and management cases, but not the scientific one.

In her most explosive chapter, she accuses political advisers of actively working to undermine her. Towards the end of her tenure, when she felt that the proof of her success had become clear with the Pfizer approval, she was surprised to find the media turning on her. Stories criticised her for giving a talk to female investors where she had mistakenly left the “confidential” mark on her slides, even though what she was sharing was no longer private. Others claimed she hired a PR firm as if it were “a personal vanity project”, when it had been charged with a campaign to recruit participants for the Covid-19 trial.

Bingham was disturbed to discover that much of the briefing had come from inside Downing Street, from advisers who failed to understand that she was just trying to spread the word about vaccines, not promote herself. She paints a sympathetic picture of an isolated and bewildered outsider — though neglects the broader context: the costly contracts for PPE that critics deemed highly questionable. The VIP lane for suppliers with government connections, later criticised as unlawful by the High Court, had put the press on high alert. The authors, however, are largely silent on this.

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. But with the UK government in turmoil, this compelling book may be most valuable as a fresh vision for how to lead in a crisis. Bingham believes Whitehall must focus on outcome, not just process; reward tempo, and punish failure to act; and that the prime minister must appoint the cabinet based on skills and experience; rather than just loyalty. Right now, that really does feel like a long shot.

The Long Shot: The Inside Story of the Race to Vaccinate Britain, by Kate Bingham and Tim Hames, Oneworld £18.99, 336 pages

Hannah Kuchler is the FT’s global pharmaceuticals correspondent

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