“Chair: Okay. We have talked a lot so far about things that went wrong, but I think we should spend some time on the big thing that went right: the vaccine programme. Three colleagues want to ask you about that, but let me open by asking: what is it that you think we got right on the vaccine that was so different from some of the other things we have been talking about today?

Dominic Cummings: I think, fundamentally, on vaccines, there was clear responsibility. There was someone who was actually in charge of it—Kate Bingham. She was working with Patrick Vallance; she built a team of people who understood what they were doing. She had the strength of character not to be pushed around.

We had a kind of formal thing which was, “You’re in charge of it. You report basically directly to the PM. You don’t report to the Department of Health.” 

So she knew who her boss was on it. She built a great team, and we also said to her, “Treat this like a wartime thing. Ignore rules. If lawyers get in your way, come to us and we’ll find ways of bulldozing them out of your way.”

Clear accountability, and people who really understood what they were doing. Relative to almost everything else in Whitehall, it was extremely low friction, and there was some great technical help. 

Those things, when you put them together, meant that it worked better than pretty much anything else.

This is not in any sense a comment on Kate, but I think the fact that it worked out relatively well to the rest of the world, though, should not blind us to the fact that we only really got that going—I think my first conversations about the idea of it with anybody were in March. Patrick Vallance texted me on, roughly, 24 March I think it was—something like that; I have got the exact date. Like lots of other things, though, there is no doubt that we could actually have done this faster than we did.

The conventional wisdom was that we were not going to be able to have any vaccines in 2020. In March, I started getting calls from various people saying, “These new MRNA vaccines could well smash the conventional wisdom, and don’t necessarily stick to it.” People like Bill Gates and that kind of network were saying that.

Essentially, what happened is that there was a network of Bill Gates-type people who were saying, “Completely re-think the whole paradigm of how you do this. Build in parallel—here is the science thing; here is the manufacturing thing; here’s the distribution; here’s the supply; here’s the logistics; here’s the data.”

The normal thing is that you do those sequentially. What Bill Gates and people like that said to me and others at No. 10 was, “You need to think of this much more like some of the classic programmes of the past—the Manhattan project in world war two or the Apollo programme—and build it all in parallel. 

In normal Government accounting terms, that is completely crazy, because if nothing works out you have spent literally billions building all these things up, and the end result is nothing—you get zero for it, it’s all waste.

What Bill Gates and people and Patrick Vallance and his team were saying was that the actual expected return on this is so high that even if it does turn out to be all wasted billions, it is still a good gamble in the end.