Planning and preparedness are not dirty words

 Dr Sarah Gilbert on Radio 4's Life Scientific this week explained what led to the lead which her team, in conjunction with AstraZeneca, has taken in producing a vaccine against Covid-19. First, she recognised that, as fellow scientists have been warning for some time, emerging zoonotic viruses like SARS 2002 and MERS 2012 are going to become more frequent and pose a world-wide threat. There needed to be a quicker response than the traditional means of developing vaccines. The result as I understand it was a kind of template, a generalised structure for a vaccine into which part of the novel virus could be plugged.

Secondly, as soon as China published the genome of Covid-19 last January, her team sprang into action in applying their method. The results have been that

clinical trials are currently underway in the UK, South Africa and Brazil. If everything goes according to plan and the vaccine meets all the necessary regulatory standards, it will be manufactured in multiple locations including the Serum Institute in India and made available for use in low to middle income countries. 

Contrast all that with the action of government. There was a wilful reduction in preparedness (and Liberal Democrat ministers have to shoulder some of the blame) from 2013 onward as the emergency stockpile of PPE was cut. Then there was a failure to act for at least six weeks after the genome was released in the full knowledge of what countries in the front line, who recognised the danger of this new SARS infection, were doing to stem it.

One might add that lobbing money to a few Tory-friendly companies with only a vague specification and precious little oversight is not the same as cooperation with industrial concerns with relevant knowledge and experience.