Success.. After All The Failures

When Boris Johnson set up the Vaccine Task Force in May last year, he gave it a clear goal. The instruction was unambiguous: to “consolidate Britain’s position at the forefront of global research and development”.

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And amid all the Government’s botched pandemic failures, the vaccine programme shines internationally as a stunning success.

It has been a victory for British scientific skill and ingenuity, industrial scale and expertise, and political determination. The wheels began to turn in early January last year when Oxford University scientists realised the world was facing a deadly pandemic. At a crisis meeting, Professor Sarah Gilbert, a vaccine researcher, revealed she had devised a possible vaccine based on a formula previously used to fight Ebola.