Mirror Health Editor Martin Bagot, who attended the Covid-19 Inquiry media lock-in, wonders where Britain would have been if it wasn’t for our world class scientists
One thing struck me when reading the 274-page Covid-19 Inquiry report on vaccines and drugs – Britain’s pandemic could have been so much worse.
That may seem nonsensical given 227,000 people in the UK died from Covid-19 and many more lives were changed forever during the devastating pandemic.
I was among journalists given advanced sight of Baroness Heather Hallett’s latest report during a two hour media lock-in on Wednesday morning, which makes clear that a generation of world-leading scientists and medics came to the rescue of our bumbling political leaders.
In earlier reports Baroness Hallett had concluded that ex-PM Boris Johnson’s pandemic government cost thousands of lives by acting too late.
She has also found that the NHS was effectively “overwhelmed” during the pandemic – despite denials by Mr Johnson and former Health Secretary Matt Hancock.
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Contact tracing was next to useless after the Tories outsourced “NHS Test and Trace” to firms such as Serco, which employed non-medically trained people in call centres on the minimum wage to do this vital work.
Our political overlords got most of the key decisions wrong and were bailed out by a generation of British scientists in our hour of need.
Heroes like Professor Sarah Gilbert who developed the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, which became the workhorse jab that quickly protected much of the UK population and was sold on a non-profit basis to vaccinate much of the developing world.
Decades of research had gone into Professor Gilbert’s work developing a vaccine platform which could be repurposed for the new virus sweeping the globe. Baroness Hallett said this groundwork would normally take between 10 to 20 years.
Professor Gilbert and her team’s work being ready just at that time meant the UK could vaccinate much of the population within a year of the first Covid-19 case.
Without that intervention the death toll could have been staggering. One study estimated that the Oxford jab, along with the Pfizer and Moderna ones rolled out on the NHS, saved 475,000 lives in England and Scotland alone.
Other scientist heroes of the pandemic were Professor Martin Landray, of Oxford Population Health, and Professor Peter Horby of the Nuffield Department of Medicine.
Shortly after the new virus emerged in Wuhan they realised that it was about to sweep the country and that no known treatments existed against it. Within two weeks they set up a groundbreaking clinical trial called RECOVERY (short for the Randomised Evaluation of COVID-19 Therapy) utilising the vast power of the NHS.
Less centralised health systems abroad struggling with the deluge of seriously ill Covid patients in intensive care were trying a host of existing drugs on without properly monitoring whether or not they worked.
In contrast, the NHS-wide RECOVERY trial tried drugs on consenting patients while properly monitoring them to the standard of a clinical trial to demonstrate which, if any, worked.
One patient would get a drug, while another matched patient would just be given the standard NHS care of respirators and organ support to help the body attempt to fight off the virus itself.
This approach was able to prove that an existing corticosteroid called dexamethasone slashed the risk of death. This meant it was the first drug known to work against Covid and within minutes of its trial results being published it became the standard treatment around the world.
By March 2021 dexamethasone had saved the lives of 22,000 Covid patients in the UK and a million globally. RECOVERY also revealed that a host of other drugs being used globally did not actually work.
The Covid-19 pandemic was a disaster but these incredible success stories mean it could have been a lot worse. Baroness Hallett’s report should make sobering reading for our current government and act as a reminder that the next pandemic could be even worse if we don’t protect Britain’s world-leading medical and scientific institutions.
