{"id":3570,"date":"2022-10-15T20:25:52","date_gmt":"2022-10-15T20:25:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3570"},"modified":"2022-11-11T10:22:40","modified_gmt":"2022-11-11T10:22:40","slug":"a-sack-of-tech-cats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3570","title":{"rendered":"A sack of tech cats"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Reading Long Shot by Kate Bingham and Tim Hames for the Telegraph, 15 October 2022<\/p>\n

\u201cNot only were we building the plane as we were flying it,\u201d writes Kate Bingham, appointed by Boris Johnson in May 2020 to chair the UK Vaccine Task Force, \u201cwe were flying in the dark and simultaneously writing the instruction manual, and fielding endless petty questions from air traffic control asking about the strength of the orange juice we were serving to passengers.\u201d<\/p>\n

The tale of Britain\u2019s vaccination effort against Covid-19 ends happily, of course: the task force arranges for clinical trials, secures 350 million doses of six vaccines, oversees any amount of novel infrastructure for their manufacture and distribution, and delivers Covid-19 as close to a knock-out blow as one could reasonably dream of.<\/p>\n

At the time of Bingham\u2019s first phone call, in January 2020, things looked rather different: it seemed to this British venture capitalist, who had no specialist knowledge of vaccine development, that she was being asked to take responsibility for a huge amount of government expenditure \u201cthat would, most likely, prove completely wasted.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vaccines normally take decades to develop, while viruses can mutate in a matter of weeks. There was, Bingham insists, very little chance of success.<\/p>\n

Britain\u2019s internationally celebrated vaccine development and production regime was set in motion, from something like a standing start, by a team, that included a bomb disposal expert, an Indian rowing star, an Italian consultant, a former ambassador, a football pundit, and the redoubtable Ruth Todd, whose day job was to see that submarines were delivered on time. This is a book about the skills and experiences necessary to build extraordinary ventures under pressure. Although the science is sketched ably enough here and there, this is not a science book.<\/p>\n

Bingham\u2019s background is in drug discovery — a notoriously unpredictable business where some of the brightest minds in biochemistry stake their future careers on one roll of the clinical-trial dice. VCs, if they\u2019re wealthy enough, can spread their risks over a few dozen companies, but even they barely survived the dot-com crash of 2001. Bingham\u2019s one of the new breed that emerged from the wreckage, an investor altogether more interested in managing the companies she helps create than in driving start-ups into premature IPOs. She still carries in her DNA an instinct for spreading risk, though: the VTF spent 4.6 billion on six vaccines in the hope that one might work, one day, maybe.<\/p>\n

Coming up to speed with the science was no easy task, even for a major biotech player. There was no shortage of brilliant work to choose from, but little way of telling what innovations would pay off on time. Bingham salutes the work of Robin Shattock at Imperial College, London, graciously acknowledging that his \u201camplified mRNA\u201d technology, which triggers large immune responses from very small amounts of vaccine, will surely be mature enough to help combat the next pandemic (and be in no doubt, there will be one). [Iona, \u201camplified mRNA\u201d is a separate (though related) technology to the mRNA tech harnessed by Pfizer]<\/p>\n

On the other hand, those teams who were fully ready were anxious to make an impact. Bingham only found out about Oxford University\u2019s non-profit vaccine partnership with AstraZeneca over the radio, and Pfizer, partnering with BioNTech, much preferred to throw its own money at things than rely on any taskforce handholding.<\/p>\n

Choreographing this sack of tech cats was not, says Bingham, her hardest task, and with the help of Tim Hames (a former chief leader writer for the Times) she patiently anatomises how she weathered the formless paranoia of politicians, the hampering good intentions of civil servants, and (most distressing of all, by some measure) the random mischief-making of government communications demons.<\/p>\n

The ears of the National Audit Office may burn (she dubs their \u201chelp\u201d a foolish and expensive joke); most everyone else emerges from this tale with due credit and generous thanks. Indeed, Bingham\u2019s candid account will be uncomfortable reading for those who nurse a dogmatic hostility to \u201cinsiders\u201d. Bingham\u2019s husband is Jesse Norman MP, then the financial secretary to the Treasury. Bingham has no difficulty demonstrating that this has nothing to do with anything, but that didn\u2019t stop the Guardian\u2019s jibes, its \u201cchumocracy\u201d tables and the rest.<\/p>\n

The trouble is, given a problem as complex and fluid as democratic government, expertise is only authoritative in relation to some particular subject. Without insiders — those with firsthand knowledge in a particular affair or circumstance (like, yes, the PM\u2019s adviser Dominic Cummings, who insisted the VTF should be handled as a business) — experts are merely preaching in the wilderness. On the other hand, without experts to inform them (people like Sir Patrick Vallance, the government\u2019s chief scientific adviser) insiders have nothing to offer but windbaggery.<\/p>\n

Knowledge and power must meet. Bingham and Hames\u2019s accessible, edge-of-the-seat account of how British innovators vaccinated the UK and much of the rest of the world is also a quiet, compelling, non partisan argument for dialogue between business and politics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Long Shot by Kate Bingham and Tim Hames for the Telegraph, 15 October 2022 \u201cNot only were we building the plane as we were flying it,\u201d writes Kate Bingham, appointed by Boris Johnson in May 2020 to chair the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617,78],"tags":[1014,63,1012,243,287,1013],"class_list":["post-3570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-reviews-and-opinion","category-reviews-and-opinion","tag-covid-19","tag-medicine","tag-pandemic","tag-politics","tag-telegraph","tag-vaccine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3570"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3570\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3594,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3570\/revisions\/3594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}