What have we learnt from this pandemic?

So great have been the government’s failures over Covid that it would be easy to forget to give credit where it is due. The fact that Britain was the first country to begin a public vaccination programme — and this week became the first to have two vaccines in use — did not come about by chance. It happened because the government had the foresight to pre-order large quantities of promising vaccines and because Britain’s medicines regulator, the MHRA, worked fast and effectively to assess the data from the trials of those vaccines. The vaccines from Pfizer and AstraZeneca underline the lifesaving role played by an often-maligned pharmaceutical industry.

But Britain’s head start will count for little if the momentum cannot be sustained. Israel is showing the world what is possible: a country barely bigger than Wales has so far administered vaccines to a greater proportion of its population than the UK.