At 6:31 A.M. on Tuesday, Margaret Keenan, a ninety-year-old former jewelry-shop assistant from the West Midlands, became the first person to receive a clinically approved coronavirus vaccine. Keenan was given the first of two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at Coventry’s University Hospital. She wore a gray cardigan with black dots and a blue T-shirt adorned with a penguin in a Santa hat. “Is that done?” Keenan asked, when the injection, in her upper left arm, was over. “All done,” May Parsons, a National Health Service matron, replied, as she put on a Band-Aid.
Cameras flashed, and Keenan was wheeled down a corridor lined with applauding medical staff, while Parsons prepared for the next patient in line, a man from Warwickshire named William Shakespeare. Watching and giving his reaction for television, Britain’s Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, teared up. And so began a joyous few hours of coördinated vaccinations across the country. In Northern Ireland, the first person to get the jab was Joanna Sloan, a twenty-eight-year-old senior nurse who will manage a vaccination center in Belfast. In Wales, it was a forty-eight-year-old care-home worker, Craig Atkins, from Ebbw Vale. At around 9 A.M., the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, was at Guy’s Hospital, by London Bridge, to watch Lyn Wheeler, an eighty-one-year-old from Bromley, receive her first dose of the vaccine. “It’s all for Britain,” Wheeler said.
The rapid launch of Britain’s coronavirus-vaccine drive is a triumph for Johnson’s government. The night before it began, Hancock branded the occasion as V Day, embracing, as is customary in Brexit Britain, any opportunity to refer to the Second World War. In recent days, around eight hundred thousand doses of the Pfizer vaccine—enough to vaccinate four hundred thousand people—have arrived from the drug company’s factory in Puurs, Belgium, after it was approved for emergency use by Britain’s medical regulator, on December 2nd. By the end of the year, another five million doses are expected, which will be administered by some fifty hospitals and immunization centers around the United Kingdom, before the effort moves to sports stadiums and other large community venues, next year.
It is an exciting stage in what has been, until now, an erratic and botched response to the pandemic, which has killed seventy-five thousand people in the U.K. During the past nine months, Johnson and his ministers have dallied with herd immunity, promised a “world class” test-and-trace system, which has yet to materialize, and talked airily about Operation Moonshot, an estimated hundred-billion-pound mass-screening program, which is currently being piloted but whose usefulness has been questioned, because of a predicted large number of erroneous results. The government has moved fast in some quarters and slowly in others, and has broken things. Last month, the Financial Times reported that, among the G-7 group of large economies, Britain’s COVID strategy is on course to achieve an unusual trifecta: the worst economic hit, the second-highest level of state spending, and the second-highest death rate. Thankfully, the government also bet big on vaccines. In addition to forty million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, Britain has ordered a hundred million doses of AstraZeneca’s, which was developed at Oxford University and is easier to move and store, and a batch of the Moderna version, for good measure. In total, the U.K. has more than three hundred and fifty-five million doses of various vaccines on the way.
Johnson’s administration claims that leaving the European Union has given the country an edge in the vaccine race. Last week, when Britain’s medicines regulator approved the Pfizer vaccine for emergency use, Hancock claimed that its officials had been able to work faster “because of Brexit.” That was not true in any formal sense. As June Raine, the head of the U.K.’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority, explained, Britain is still bound by European law until its absolute departure from the bloc, on January 1st. Under E.U. rules, any member state can grant emergency approval for a drug. (Hungary is currently planning to experiment with Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine.) The reason that most European countries haven’t done so is that they are coördinating their vaccination drives. The European Medicines Agency has pencilled approval of the Pfizer vaccine for December 29th. But Brexit, like other nationalist projects, has never been overly concerned with facts. It is more of an attitude. Gavin Williamson, Britain’s Education Secretary, was asked whether Brexit had helped to catalyze the vaccination drive. “We’ve obviously got the best medical regulators,” he told the radio station LBC. “Much better than the French have, much better than the Belgians have, much better than the Americans have. That doesn’t surprise me at all, because we’re a much better country than every single one of them, aren’t we?”
It takes a certain mind-set to see the ravages of COVID-19—and the hopeful cross-border collaborations of science—as an opportunity for national self-congratulation. But here we are. On Wednesday, Johnson plans to travel to Brussels to finally seal the terms of a post-Brexit trade deal with the E.U. The second, and much more consequential, phase of negotiations around Britain’s departure from the bloc has been interrupted and overshadowed by the pandemic. But that hasn’t changed the underlying fact that, even if there is a deal, the U.K. will emerge on the other side of its current catastrophe with a more distant economic and political relationship with its neighbors than at any time in the past fifty years. And, for a time, despite all evidence to the contrary, its leaders will continue to tell the population that this was the right thing to do; that, in a troubled, randomly colliding world, we are better off apart, outsiders with an edge, taking a moonshot, celebrating our V Days.
