My blazing bust-up with Kate Bingham over vaccines

Monday, May 4, 2020

Boris suggested Kate Bingham

[as head of the new Vaccine Taskforce]. She’s a formidable venture capitalist with a background in the pharmaceutical industry and will be ideal.

Friday, June 19

A massive blow-up with Kate. She simply doesn’t see the need to order 100 million doses of the Oxford vaccine – she wants 30million – and can’t seem to grasp almost everyone may want or need it.

I warned her during today’s meeting that if we don’t get our ducks in a row on this one, we risk a complete car crash.

She pushed back hard. But with the other elected Ministers on my side, I won the argument

[for buying 100 million doses].

‘I’m not happy with that meeting,’ Kate snapped afterwards. ‘Nor me,’ I replied.

‘We will create a guide for you to explain what we are doing – there are enormous risks with this,’ she said, as if I don’t spend all my time thinking about how to save lives.

Kate pressed on, claiming that the technology that underpins the vaccine Oxford is working on ‘is neither proven nor scaled’, and that she has ‘an expert team who are working round the clock, pushing hard’.

I told her: ‘We need to have tried everything feasibly possible to accelerate delivery. I’ve been asking the same question over and over again and not yet had a satisfactory answer – hence my frustration.’

This only seemed to wind her up further, prompting a mini-lecture about the dangers of trying to go too far too fast.

‘The worse case is we kill people with an unsafe vaccine,’ she said. ‘We need to tone the comms to register the fact this is risky and unproven.’

If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s being patronised.

Monday, July 6

The Vaccine Taskforce have consistently argued that we only need to back three [vaccine] brands. My view is that, to hedge our bets, we need more. Any one of the vaccines could fail in clinical trials.

Fortunately, Rishi and Steve Barclay at the Treasury are totally onside.

Sunday, October 4

Kate has been telling the Financial Times we should only vaccinate the vulnerable. Except she has nothing to do with the deployment – only the buying. And what she’s criticising is the Government’s agreed policy. ‘We absolutely need No 10 to sit on her hard,’ I told the spads [special advisers], adding that I consider her ‘totally unreliable’.

Tuesday, October 6

The Economist has got wind of an old vaccine deployment plan. I instinctively asked my spads if Kate might be behind it. ‘I have some evidence to suggest it might have been – ie the fact she had a meeting yesterday with the journalist who has the story,’ came the reply. Who knows, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Sunday, November 8

The Sunday Times has done a hatchet job on Kate, revealing that she spent £670k of taxpayers’ money on hiring eight full-time spin doctors. I had no idea it was at public expense.

‘Who the hell signed this off?’ I asked the team. Blank faces all round. Turns out the contract went through the Department for Business, not us, so we had no opportunity to block it. I’ve no idea what Kate was thinking: we have plenty of brilliant comms people who would have been more than capable.

Thursday, February 18, 2021

A senior member of the

Vaccine Taskforce is threatening to resign. It transpires he and Kate have a fundamental problem with us buying vaccines from India. It explains why we didn’t get the Indian doses last year: he and Kate were working against it, and completely ignoring ministerial steers.

‘That’s why we kept getting bull **** excuses,’ I told Boris.

Friday, February 19

We finally managed to secure almost ten million extra doses from India. We could have had them in December, had Kate and her allies not been working behind the scenes to block them.