What could possibly go wrong with the coronavirus vaccine? Boris Johnson has boasted that the UK is ‘towards the front of the pack’ when it comes to orders of the Pfizer/BioNTech inoculation, and health chiefs say they hope to start rolling it out from December, if it gets approval.
The biggest ‘if’ now isn’t so much the approval process as it is the government’s ability to deliver a vaccination programme at such a big scale. So far, large government projects involving coronavirus have not inspired a great deal of confidence. First there was the government’s insistence that it was on top of demand for personal protective equipment for hospitals and care homes. Then there was the – ongoing – saga of the Test and Trace programme. This definitely falls into the category of ‘beleaguered’ now, and things aren’t improving: the last week of October was its worst ever, failing to reach more than 40 per cent of infected people.
TAT boss Dido Harding was giving evidence today to a joint meeting of the health and social care select committee and science and technology committee, and accepted that her system had not predicted the scale of demand for testing once schools returned in the autumn.
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