The beginning of Covid-19 vaccinations is a remarkable moment

Editorial: The government has to learn from the mistakes of the past and ensure the rollout happens in an orderly way

The coronavirus vaccine will be distributed in the coming weeks (AFP/Getty)

Someone, somewhere in the UK is the happy recipient of the first Covid-19 vaccination. The first in the western world, leaving aside trials, and the first of many millions to be administered.

It is a remarkable moment, and one for jubilation, despite the anonymity of the occasion. The achievement is down to an extraordinary global collaborative effort, with academia and the private sector forming a formidable alliance. 

It had little, if anything, to do with chauvinistic glory-hunter politicians. It is, after all, only a year since the first – officially acknowledged and recorded – coronavirus case, then unknown and unnamed, in Wuhan. The speed at which the world has moved to this point is, like so much else to do with this crisis, unprecedented, but this time “in a good way”, as the phrase goes.

Science and business have under-promised and over-delivered. That, as we know, is the opposite of the government’s performance, and already there are questions about the availability of the Pfizer vaccine, just as there were about shortages of protective equipment and ventilators in the past. This time round, ministers are trying to correct the mistakes of the past, and give priority to those in care homes.

However the process of moving vast quantities of vaccine safely and at the right temperature is also unprecedented, and the government record on logistics has been mixed. The Pfizer vaccine is sensitive to temperature, and especially difficult to store for long periods. There also seems to be no clear idea of how many vaccines will arrive in Britain by the end of the year, for example – beyond an initial consignment of 800,000. The obvious threat to shifting medicines from Belgium to the UK is Brexit; the fact that ministers are lining up RAF transport as a backup is not as reassuring as it might be, but indicative of chaos that could be on the horizon.

The hierarchy of those eligible for an early vaccination seems well-judged, skewed heavily by age though the needs of some may have been neglected. As the other vaccines become available it should be possible to better match the type of vaccine to the profile of the recipient. It is also a relief to see that clinical needs will be paramount and no one should be able to use money to jump the queue. 

Yet any vaccine needs mass adoption to achieve its full efficacy, and early polling evidence suggests a disturbingly high level of public resistance to taking it, fed by all manner of nonsense on social media. Still, that is not so new, and there has always been a minority who fancy themselves smarter than the science. 

They have been overcome before, and they can be overcome again – by argument, reason, the experience with diseases such as polio and smallpox, and by leadership and example. But, like pandemics before, is also a global problem and demands a global approach to mass vaccination to keep coronavirus under control. 

As well as care homes in the prosperous west, the vaccine also needs to reach the poorest regions of the world. On that challenge we have heard depressingly little.