Arise, Dame Kate: honour for head of vaccine drive as PM pushes to inoculate the world
THE venture capitalist behind Britain’s vaccination success is to be rewarded with a damehood, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal, as Boris Johnson today urges a worldwide inoculation drive to end the pandemic “for good” by next year.
Kate Bingham, 55, is to receive the honour for her unpaid work leading the UK Vaccines Taskforce and obtaining access to millions of doses of six different coronavirus jabs. Yesterday, the 40millionth patient received their first Covid jab.
Ms Bingham’s damehood is expected to be among a host of honours for “heroes” of the pandemic response, to be unveiled in the Queen’s birthday honours list next weekend.
The disclosure comes as the Prime Minister, who appointed Ms Bingham to the taskforce last May, prepares to use his role as host of the G7 summit to urge leaders to commit to “vaccinating the world” by the end of next year.
Mr Johnson will seek “concrete commitments” from the US, French, German, Japanese, Italian and Canadian leaders, which UK officials hope to unveil, along with a major rise in British vaccine donations, during the summit in Cornwall this week.
While some 1.5 billion doses have been administered globally, only around 1 per cent of them have been delivered in Africa, according to the World Health Organisation.
Speaking ahead of the summit, Mr Johnson said: “Next week, the leaders of the world’s greatest democracies will gather at a historic moment for our countries and for the planet.
“The world is looking to us to rise to the greatest challenge of the post-war era: defeating Covid and leading a global recovery driven by our shared values. Vaccinating the world by the end of next year would be the single greatest feat in medical history.
“I’m calling on my fellow G7 leaders
to join us to end this terrible pandemic and pledge we will never allow the devastation wreaked by coronavirus to happen again.”
Ms Bingham usually develops drugs to help patients with autoimmune disease and cancer, but had no previous experience with vaccines.
Her brief from the Prime Minister, on taking up the role, was “to stop people from dying”.
Following her appointment, she was the subject of “chumocracy” accusations – she is married to the Conservative minister Jesse Norman. But when the scale of the taskforce’s success in securing vaccines became clear, she was widely praised as a “heroine” of the Covid-19 response.
Under her leadership, the taskforce helped the Government to secure agreements to have access to six different vaccines across four different formats – without being certain any of them would work. The work led to the UK becoming a world leader in rolling out vaccines to its population.
The UK has now ordered more than 500million doses of seven of the most promising vaccines, including the four so far approved for use.
Speaking as she was announced as chairman of the taskforce, Ms Bingham said: “Our immediate aim on vaccines is two-fold: to ensure everyone in the UK that needs to be vaccinated against Covid-19 can be as soon as practicable.
“Secondly, to ensure adequate global distribution of vaccines to bring the quickest possible end to the pandemic and the economic and social damage it causes.” The Government funded the development and production of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, which has been made available at cost around the world. It makes up 450million of 1.5billion global doses administered so far.
The need to distribute vaccines to developing countries will take centre stage at this week’s G7 summit, which will involve three days of meetings in Carbis Bay from Friday.
Speakers including Sir Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Adviser, Melinda French Gates and Sir David Attenborough will appear virtually.
On Saturday, the group will be joined either in person or virtually by the leaders of Australia, South Africa, South Korea and India for discussions on health and climate change.
Mr Johnson will also seek support for the Global Pandemic Radar – a worldwide surveillance system designed to detect vaccine-resistant variants before they have the chance to spread.
‘The world is looking to us to rise to the challenge [of] defeating Covid and leading a global recovery’