The Long Shot
The Inside Story of the Race to Vaccinate Britain
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
How Covid-19 vaccines went from the laboratory to people’s arms – the inside story of an extraordinary national campaign against all odds
A Sunday Times bestseller and Financial Times Book of the Year.
The unmissable inside story of the race against the virus.
Catapulted into an international crisis, Kate Bingham knew the odds were heavily stacked against a workable Covid-19 vaccine.
From a remote cottage, Bingham juggled vaccine suppliers, Whitehall, the media circus… as deaths mounted and the world shut down. Political manoeuvring, miscommunications and administrative meddling nearly jeopardised the project. But perseverance and expertise paid off.
Bingham’s eclectic team secured the first vaccine doses administered in the West, saving thousands of lives in the UK as new variants struck. Now, nearly every adult in Britain has had the jab, lockdowns have ended and we can finally live with Covid.
This is the insider view into how the Vaccine Taskforce beat those long odds and delivered a scientific miracle.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bingham, who served as the chair of the U.K. Vaccine Taskforce, and journalist Hames debut with an incisive behind-the-scenes look at the challenges Bingham faced in her role. When British prime minister Boris Johnson asked Bingham, a managing partner at a venture capital firm with a history of investing in new medicines, to helm a group charged with getting shots into arms by the end of 2020, she was initially hesitant, as her decades of experience in biotech and drug development had taught her that "drug discovery at breakneck speed" was impossible. She ended up accepting the position, only to find that the science, including the unprecedented use of mRNA, was only part of the problem. She and her team had to overcome unrealistic promises of how many doses would be available within months, and navigate confusing misstatements by Johnson, such as when he explained that Britain's capacity for vaccine creation was limited because the country didn't "have any enzymes." Nonetheless, on Dec. 8, 2020, the world's first Covid-19 vaccination took place in the U.K. The authors combine a lucid explanation of the scientific breakthroughs needed to create the first Covid vaccine with an insider look at the politics that hampered the taskforce's efforts. The result is a valuable addition to the literature documenting the crisis.
