The Telegraph
Story by Clive Dix • Yesterday 7:00 PM
Iworked with Matt Hancock the whole time I was at the Vaccine Taskforce and he was, without doubt, the
most difficult of all the ministers because he didn't take time to understand anything.
Clive Dix© Provided by The Telegraph
He was all over the place, a bit like a headless chicken. He often made statements saying "we are going to do X and we want to let the world know about it", but we were dealing with an uncertain situation in bringing the vaccines forward.
The manufacturing process was brand new and any process like this is fraught with problems, which we need to fix as we go along, but normally you would spend two or three years stress-testing something like this.
Hancock was laying down timelines by saying things like "we will vaccinate the whole population", and these timelines drove his behaviour.
It was always going to be tricky to get an exact date of when vaccines would arrive and it was always a best guess or an estimate. Getting a vaccine in that timescale is fraught with issues, and I don't think that ministers understood that.
When we said
the AstraZeneca vaccine had manufacturing problems, that is when Hancock panicked.
He didn't believe us. We were working night and day to make it work and he was turning around and saying: "I have said the UK population will all get vaccinated."
But we couldn't change the nature of the process and he didn't get that. He thought it was like procurement. That is where his behaviour came from. He panicked and that led to them going to India and taking vaccines that had been meant for the developing world.