Patrick Vallance was right to hedge his vaccine bets

Patrick Vallance has rightly come under fire over the use of statistics during the government’s now infamous lockdown press conference, but we ought to give him some credit for the UK’s preparedness for a Covid vaccine. It was Vallance’s forward thinking that established the taskforce responsible for securing 40 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine (enough to cover 20 million people) back in May 2020. This taskforce also made the call to spread the UK’s vaccine investment across six suppliers. People will quibble about the number of doses ordered, but thanks to Vallance, the UK is in a position to benefit from whichever vaccine reaches the market first.

After months of negative headlines, Boris Johnson’s government also deserves some praise. Who knows what Labour – with its natural bias against Big Pharma – would have done had they been in power under Corbyn. They certainly wouldn’t have appointed the controversial Kate Bingham, a venture capitalist, to head up the vaccine taskforce, as Johnson and Hancock did six months ago.