Former vaccines tsar Dame Kate Bingham puts Boris Johnson to shame – Tom Richmond

They were far more assured than Boris Johnson’s bluster – and spoke with greater clarity of purpose than virtually every Cabinet Minister or Opposition front bencher. Yet the irony is that they’re not even a humble MP.

I refer to the totally compelling evidence to Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee by Dame Kate Bingham who headed the Vaccines Task Force last year to worldwide acclaim.

Her evidence over the Omicron variant on Tuesday, and potential of a million infections a day, contrasted with the self-interest in the subsequent debate on Covid restrictions when nearly 100 Tory backbenchers defied the PM.

Dame Kate was succinct when asked what had gone wrong in recent weeks – she said the virus had got “ahead of us”. She also said doses would need to become cheaper to administer to minimise economic disruption and that this should include the development of “patches, pills or sprays” as queues grow at walk-in vaccine centres across Yorkshire.

“We can’t be in a position where we have to go through this monumental logistics challenge of actually getting vaccines into arms,” she continued before explaining how Covid will continue to circulate like flu and the “most vulnerable will need to be vaccinated more regularly, maybe yearly now”.

She urged Ministers to respect scientists – questioning the decision not to go ahead with new advance medicine manufacturing plants in the North East when it is possible to develop new vaccines within 100 days as variants like Omicron emerge. And, perhaps most profoundly of all, she warned: “Until we vaccinate the world, we are going to get variants.”

Yet the question is why such insight and expertise is no longer being used when the Johnson government appears to be squandering some of the hard-earned progress made when Britain was pioneering Covid vaccines last year.

Dame Kate is right – work needs to be taking place now to develop and deliver future vaccines if the economy is not to suffer the type of hiatuses and disruption being experienced and endured now.

And the need to utilise the expertise of Dame Kate, and others, was highlighted by Anne Marie Morris, a Tory MP in deepest Devon. “We are using the wrong people to do the wrong jobs,” she said as she called for an emergency resilience task force to be put in place by Christmas.

Just who did she have in mind?! At least this was a constructive suggestion unlike the acrimony witnessed when Marcus Fysh, one rebel, condemned vaccine certificates by saying “we are not a ‘papers please’ society’ while his colleague Simon Hoare condemned an “obscene and offensive choice of words” and that this is not Nazi Germany.

The type of odious language that characterised Theresa May’s downfall and demise over Brexit, it also illustrates how Johnson has lost his grip on power, two years after winning an 80-seat majority, and the ability to plan for the longer term over Covid.

He presides over a weak and divided Parliamentary party now dependent on the support of Labour to pass public health laws – and there are senior Opposition MPs now decidedly queasy at being asked by Sir Keir Starmer to put their trust in such a divided and dysfunctional government to make the correct calls iver this crisis.

Johnson is now openly mocked by his own MPs. When he briefed the 1922 Committee backbenchers, the suggestion was that his speech neutralised the rebellion. Instead it went up when 99 Tory MPs decided that they had more in common with former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Some clearly lied to whips over their voting intentions.

And the mutiny – bigger than the revolts that took place under the Thatcher, Major and Cameron governments, and not far short of the record Brexit rebellion under the May administration – leaves Johnson, and the country, in an invidious position.

How can the PM ask Tory MPs to back even more stringent economic and social restrictions if necessary, even recalling Parliament over Christmas, when Johnson personally, and his government in general, are held in such contempt over multiple scandals of impropriety, broken promises and inattention to detail over Covid?

Effectively a Prime Minister in name only, Boris Johnson either allows his authority to disintegrate further, and, in turn, put the nation’s health at greater risk, or he defers to great people in science, medicine and public policy like Dame Kate Bingham who appear to be ahead of the curve when it comes to suppressing Covid. It’s his choice – it’s also one on which our lives now depend.

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Tom Richmond is Comment Editor of The Yorkshire Post. He tweets via OpinionYP.

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