MH speech 2 June 2021:
"But Britain’s incredibly high levels of confidence around the vaccine aren’t an accident, and weren’t something we could take for granted.
We had to win trust.
Trust is a crucial component of any major project, and the way to win trust is through openness and honesty."
"So for instance we were up-front from the start that there would be side effects and that we’d have to manage them.
We levelled with people that vaccine supply is often lumpy, and so volumes would differ week on week.
And we were honest about the uncertainties, for instance that it’d take time to discover what impact new variants might have on any vaccine."
"Now I know there were a few eyebrows raised when I said that the film ‘Contagion’ shaped my thinking about our vaccine programme.
I should reassure Sir John Bell that it wasn’t my primary source of advice, but when I watched the film a penny did drop for me."
"Another team who are vaccine heroes are our first-rate regulators. Throughout this crisis, the MHRA, under the brilliant stewardship of Dr June Raine, has excelled, and been a global model for how to regulate. And in fact Andrew Pollard was taking me around the Oxford science labs earlier today and explaining, each time he mentioned the regulator, our regulator is dynamic and flexible and helps science to proceed.
They’re everything a Health Secretary could want."
Hmmm...
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/how-we-got-here-lessons-from-the-uk-vaccine-rollout