BORIS JOHNSON: The Great Covid Vaccine Roll-Out proves Britain is not damaged. We simply have to throw off the useless hand of Starmerism

I am afraid that it is all too easy to forget these days that Britain is an absolutely amazing country, and capable of amazing feats. We have a Labour Government that is so catastrophically mismanaging the economy that the departure lounges are crammed with talented Brits trying to escape the Starmer-Reeves tax nightmare, some of them even choosing Belgium, heaven help us, over the UK.

We have unemployment rising to 5.2 per cent. Our Royal Navy used to rule the waves but now gives the general impression of not being able to pull the skin off a rice pudding.

We did finally manage to send HMS Dragon to help protect UK bases in Cyprus from Iranian attacks, though at the time of writing, the fabled destroyer appears to be in port for repairs (again), the problem this time being that the showers don’t work.

The England rugby team seems to have been defeated by the Italians.

As for the state of UK politics, I hardly know what to say. Starmer clings to the precipice, until the day when his fingertips are finally stomped on by the Doc Martens of – lawks a mercy – Angela Rayner and he plunges yowling into the void, his £2,000 Lord Alli-funded spectacles following him down to Hades.

Until then, Labour drifts on, aimless, hopeless, lifeless. These are dark days. So I hope readers will forgive me for seizing on whatever spark of hope I can find.

It is at precisely these moments when our heads are down that we need to remember that there are also times when we can beat all-comers. As it happens, we have had just such a reminder this week, from the unlikely quarter of the Covid Inquiry.

Baroness Hallett and her team have concluded that the vaccine roll-out was an ‘extraordinary’ operation. She is right. It was.

The nation came together with such a sense of zap, drive, spunk and overall can-do spirit that it might be useful to recall how we did it – the ingredients for that miracle; because it seems very likely that we will need them again.

When I say a miracle, I mean a miracle of almost biblical proportions – because in those awful first few weeks of Covid back in spring 2020, there seemed no reason why we should find a vaccine at all. There was and is no vaccine for Aids, or for Sars, or for other respiratory diseases. These afflictions had been around for decades, and billions had been poured into the search.

Why should the Almighty decide, this time, to favour the human race?

Remember: we had an unpleasant new viral disease that could be particularly nasty for elderly people; we had a lot of people dying either from the disease, or with the disease, and we had no cure.

All we had was the whole ghastly job-destroying, life-destroying, hope-destroying panoply of social restrictions – those rules on human contact whose overall effectiveness, in retrospect, is a matter of legitimate debate.

The virus arrived in Britain in January 2020 and it must have been that summer when I first heard what sounded like the distant toot of the cavalry. Someone said there were encouraging signs from the trials of a vaccine being developed in Oxford, by the pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca. The drug not only worked in mice. It seemed to be building up immunity in human beings.

This was exciting news, and of course, the Government had already started taking huge bets on these vaccines such as early financing of Oxford-AstraZeneca.

Even so, I couldn’t really believe my ears. For much of that autumn of 2020 we were still grappling with a giant test-to-release scheme (which allowed international arrivals in Britain to quarantine for five days only if they paid for a private Covid test), which proved ultimately too unwieldy, as well as the

ill-fated ‘tiering’ system of regional lockdowns (I shudder at the memory).

And then – just when we needed it – the news from the labs got better and better.

It really looked as though we would have a workable jab, and by the beginning of December, we did. The key figure to remember about the UK vaccine roll-out is that by March 2021 we had inoculated getting on for 50 per cent of the UK adult population. It was astonishingly fast. No comparable country came close.

In the EU 27 – the bloc we had just left – the figure was about 10-12 per cent. It is vital, now, to recall how we did it. No one looking at the UK success can ignore the key role of the NHS – a unified system in which the country generally believes strongly; and of course it also helped that GPs were given good incentives to vaccinate their patients.

We were also lucky in having a collection of brilliant people who helped devise the vaccines (in the case of Oxford-AstraZeneca) and who also secured such large stocks that the NHS had no worries – at least at first – about supply.

It is now conventional, and entirely justified, to mention in particular some of the heroines of the roll-out: Sarah Gilbert the Oxford scientist, Maddy McTernan, who did so much of the negotiations with the pharma companies, and Kate Bingham, who led the Vaccine Taskforce.

There were many others, from both the private and public sectors.

Then there was one other factor that is these days not fashionable to mention, but that indisputably contributed to the UK’s success. We had just come out of the EU. One of the reasons I had fought so hard for Brexit – and full regulatory freedom, full escape from the single market – was because I believed that in a globalised economy, a country such as Britain needed to be fast, and flexible, and able to set its own rules; not, in other words, to be hamstrung by EU bureaucracy.

It was only weeks after formally leaving the EU – and taking back control of our laws – that this ambition was comprehensively vindicated, and with breathtaking clarity.

Brexit was important for the vaccine roll-out in two key ways. First, it meant that we were not part of the whole EU procurement programme. The entire task of negotiating supplies for 27 countries was handed to the European Commission, and though the Brussels officials did their best they were no match for Kate Bingham and her team.

The British buyers knew the companies; they knew all the players. They didn’t have to wait for 27 delegations to approve the prices they offered. They knew that they had complete political top cover to buy those precious vials of life-saving fluid, from wherever they could find it.

That freedom meant that by the time the vaccines actually became available, the UK had already placed bigger, better and more legally watertight orders for the drugs. The second vital advantage of Brexit was that the UK was able to approve these drugs faster.

We were out of the single market institutions; and that meant that we were no longer part of the European Medicines Agency; and that allowed the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency to say yes to Pfizer 19 days ahead of the EU, and to say yes to AstraZeneca fully 30 days ahead.

That may not sound like a very long time to you, but this was a period – the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021 – when the virus was rampant. I’ll say it again: we had no cure for a disease that was killing sometimes more than a thousand people a day.

Every day mattered. Every day of unnecessary regulatory delay was another day in which the highly contagious alpha variant could spread to more people.

It was thanks to Brexit that we were able simply to get on with it, as fast as we liked, and put a lifesaving vaccine into the arms of large numbers of elderly and often very frightened people.

It was thanks to Brexit that we were able to launch our roll-out campaign weeks ahead of the EU 27.

I will not mince my words. Brexit saved lives. People now try very occasionally to pretend that we could somehow have achieved the same results while remaining in the EU; that we would have exercised emergency powers to derogate from EU procedures, and done our own thing. That is rubbish.

Inside the EU, we would have clung to the supposed security of being ‘part of the pack’, and everything, from vaccine procurement to regulation and approval, would have been done at EU level.

Brexit not only saved lives, but the speed of our vaccine roll-out ultimately saved the economy billions as well. We had vaccinated our population so fast, and built up such a wall of immunity, that we were able to announce the end of all Covid restrictions on July 19, 2021 – while most of the EU remained in some form of lockdown.

France didn’t end its vaccine passport regime until March 2022, and Italy and Germany also kept restrictions in place well into that year. It was the speed of that vaccine roll-out that enabled the UK therefore to have the fastest economic rebound of any G7 country; and while all this was happening I am afraid that our EU partners were seething with jealousy.

They could see that Brexit was partly responsible. They hated that fact. Their irritation was so intense that at one stage in February 2021 they actually tried to slow down our roll-out by sequestering UK vaccine supplies at a warehouse in Holland – five million doses of AstraZeneca that legally belonged to the UK, but which they effectively impounded.

It was outrageous, and disgusting. It was also dog-in-the-manger-ish in the sense that the embargo was driven not by their own medical requirements but by a cynical desire to frustrate the UK, and to take the shine off the success of the roll-out.

At that stage the EU did not even need those doses themselves. Both French president Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel had been critical of AstraZeneca, with Macron saying that the vaccine was ‘quasi-ineffective’. (Indeed I am not sure that the disputed doses were ever actually used in the EU.) At one point, I was so enraged by the whole business that I even thought of somehow liberating our vaccines from the warehouse in Leiden, perhaps by sending representatives of UK Special Forces up the canals in dinghies; and then, of course, thought better of it.

The actions of the EU were exceedingly unhelpful; but in the end we managed, and the roll-out was pretty much unimpeded. The whole vaccine roll-out experience left me more convinced than ever that it would be insane to go back into the EU system – as Starmer is doing.

Whatever the problems of the UK economy – low skills, poor infrastructure, bad planning law, high tax, hostility to enterprise and so on – absolutely none of them can be fixed by taking rules from Brussels. We need greater freedom, not renewed servitude.

Above all, the vaccine roll-out taught me that we are still capable of prodigious national accomplishments. If you let free-market capitalists and government work together; if you encourage individual leaders and entrepreneurs rather than clock-watching jobsworths; and if people actually believe passionately in what they are doing – the results are astonishing.

I remember going to a vaccine centre in Cwmbran in South Wales, in February 2021, and feeling this enormous sense of positive energy, as people rolled up their sleeves to protect themselves and the country. The closest thing I have seen – for that sense of collective serotonin buzz – is the London Olympics in 2012, and the thousands of volunteers who helped to turn what people said would be a catastrophe into a triumph for the UK.

Looking at the way the world is going, I wouldn’t be surprised if we are all called on again to roll up our sleeves and pull together. We can’t keep going with such enormous spending on welfare, and so little on defence; we can’t go on with Labour’s calamitous economic model.

Will we have the willpower when the next big challenge comes? Will we rise to it? Do we still have the right stuff? On the evidence of the Covid vaccine roll-out, the answer is unquestionably and emphatically yes.

One day, we will throw off the dead hand of Starmerist socialism in all its morosity and timidity, and recover our self-belief. The vaccine roll-out reminds us how it is done.