Whitehall ‘group think’ and inter-departmental rows slammed by vaccine tsar
Dame Kate Bingham was commissioned by the previous government to help the UK secure vaccines during the pandemic.
There was “open warfare” between government departments during the Covid-19 pandemic, the former head of the UK’s Vaccines Taskforce has said.
Dame Kate Bingham, who helped the UK secure vaccines during the crisis, said there was “clearly tensions” between the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and the Department of Health and Social Care.
She also criticised “group think” within government and said civil servants spend more time writing policy papers rather than “getting to the heart of what they’re trying to do”.
Meanwhile, she highlighted the “rotating seats” in Whitehall, saying that the government was unable to build up expertise internally due to a reliance on external management consultancies.
Dame Kate told the pandemic probe that Sir Patrick Vallance, former chief scientific adviser to the government who is currently serving as Science Minister, had to stop the purchase of a chicken egg manufacturing plant during the pandemic.
“Patrick Vallance had to stop Whitehall from investing in a chicken egg manufacturing plant, because that is the way that vaccines always used to be made, with lots and lots of people injecting chicken eggs, and that’s how you get vaccines,” she told the UK Covid-19 Public Inquiry.
“And he had to say: ‘Well, have you actually heard about recombinant techniques, which is the modern way of making vaccines’?
“So what happens is, you’ve basically got this group think, and we saw it with mRNA (vaccines), and, ‘at last, we’ve got a vaccine, we now can basically ignore everything else we’ve done, we ignore the fact that we need a breadth of vaccine formats’.
“And in fact, even the JCVI (Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation) now has had to formally put it in their recommendations that they want to have a protein-based vaccine, because government, at the moment, is going down a very narrow ‘we’ve got mRNA, and this is all we ever need forever’. And that is not true.”
Dame Kate also criticised the proportion of civil servants who have humanities degrees, adding: “if you have a PhD in the civil service, you hide it under a bushel, because as soon as you’re … discovered to be a scientist, then you’re a wonk, and you’re put in the corner, and you’re never allowed to do anything.”
She went on: “And more importantly, no-one’s ever done anything.
“So they’re all busy writing policy papers and sending each other stuff to review and all that.
“None of that actually gets to the heart of what it is they’re trying to do. What are they trying to achieve? And are they measured against the delivery of their goals? And the answer is no.
“In the private sector, you don’t deliver your goals, you’re out of a job, and you have to move on. And in the private sector, you get referenced, and if you don’t perform, people know about that. That is not the way it works in the civil service.”
Asked about her request to have a direct channel to then-prime minister Boris Johnson during her tenure as leader of the Vaccines Taskforce (VTF), she said: “There was clearly tensions between the Business Department and the Department of Health, and that there would be interference at a ministerial level and from officials if I didn’t have a very clear reporting to the PM.”
She later added: “It was quite clear there was open warfare between BEIS and Department of Health.”
On the use of external agencies by the civil service, she went on: “That seemed to be a default move within the civil service… and what it means is you’ve got a civil service that never builds that level of expertise internally, because they are always outsourcing it and relying on external experts.
“And the more you outsource it to major management consultancies, the more you’re never going to build that capability internally.
“So I am critical of the rotating seats that we see in Whitehall and no focus or even recognition of the need to build up that expertise.”
Dame Kate criticised a decision not to pre-emptively buy more of the Covid-19 drug Evusheld during the pandemic.
The drug, made by AstraZeneca, contains two antibodies against Covid that boost protection for those whose immune systems do not respond well to vaccines.
She said that a decision not to buy larger quantities of the drug meant that “clinically vulnerable, immunocompromised patients were being de-prioritised in favour of those who were able to receive vaccines”.
Dame Kate added that witness statements to the inquiry “clearly show that there was zero appetite” in the Department of Health “to actually consider how these patients would be treated”.
“So the the evidence is that it was cheaper to let these clinically vulnerable individuals, who were already shielding, to stay shielding at home, and then if they were to be infected, then they would be treated with with drugs,” she said.
In 2023, the medicines spending watchdog, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, said that Evusheld should not be widely used in the NHS because there was no evidence that the drug protects against newer variants of Covid-19.
