This is a brilliant account of the UK's world-beating COVID-19 vaccine project and makes excellent reading for anyone wanting to understand both the story of the UK COVID-19 vaccine programme and also how a successful large-scale project is delivered. It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. From a remote cottage, Bingham juggled vaccine suppliers, Whitehall, the media circus… as deaths mounted and the world shut down. The Times and The Guardian are shown as particularly eager recipients and disseminators of spun misinformation about the VTF. Bingham’s eclectic team secured the first vaccine doses administered in the West, saving thousands of lives in the UK as new variants struck.With regards to the briefings against Bingham, one of the revelations I found most shocking was how Lee Cain, the Number 10 Director of Communications was briefing against her and the vaccine task force, despite the vaccine project being a flagship initiative of the Johnson government and one that was initiated and championed by Boris himself. She is a board member of the Francis Crick Institute and was awarded a DBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for her services as Chair of the UK Vaccine Taskforce.

Catapulted into an international crisis, Kate Bingham knew the odds were heavily stacked against a workable Covid-19 vaccine. Covid is still spreading, probably mutating and just waiting for the next advantageous circumstance to jump back into wider global populations. With the revelations concerning partygate and other scandals it does make one question what sort of the administration Johnson was running in No 10. 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.

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. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. From a small cottage, Bingham juggled vaccine suppliers, Whitehall, the media circus – and her daughter’s exams. 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.

As an outsider rooted in business, she offers strong and specific recommendations for transforming government. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Political manoeuvring, miscommunications and administrative meddling nearly jeopardised the project. 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. A blueprint of how industry, academia and government can work together to address a question of global importance, with lessons for other future crises.No and the book argues that Britain will probably be less prepared than it was for the covid pandemic. The book warns this kind of success is not likely to be repeated without mass production facilities in Britain. SV’s investments have led to the launch of twenty drugs for inflammatory and autoimmune disease, blindness and cancer.

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. Fast-paced and very compelling… The Vaccine Taskforce will always be remembered as British science at its very best. He was a lecturer in Politics at Oxford University 1989–96, specialising in American and British Government. But I have to disagree with the title, because the book shows that it really wasn’t such a "long shot" with Kate at the helm. One of the most notable is where she highlights the lack of relevant skills in the Civil Service and highlights the '.nearly complete absence in the civil service of scientific, industrial, commercial and manufacturing skills'. Matt Hancock eventually recognises that the Department of Health was not up to the job of hosting the Vaccine Task Force; Michael Gove appears (surprisingly) as a more results-orientated minister than a spin-orientated minister. 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.