Smug Matt Hancock boasts about UK’s vaccine success as he tries to recover from Cummings’ criticism 

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Matt Hancock took credit for the UK’s vaccine rollout today as he mounted a political fightback to save his political life.

The Health Secretary used a global Covid conference in Oxford today to praise the take-up of the jab – and his own role in getting it into the arms of grateful Britons. 

He also praise the swift work in creating new wonder drugs, claiming it helped save more than a million lives because work began before the first UK case was identified.

And he told the assembled delegates: ‘Lots of people stop me and ask me how we did all of this?’  

He  said he had been told it would take at least five years to develop a coronavirus vaccine at the start of the pandemic.

‘I specifically remember a then meek and timid professor turning to me when I asked how fast this could possibly be done,’ he said.

‘He said that if everything went right then the very best we could hope for would be 12 to 18 months.

‘Who would have thought that just 11 months later we’d be the first country in the world with a clinically authorised vaccine and that professor Jonathan Van Tam would be turning down Strictly.’   

His confident speech will be seen as the start of a fight- back after a brutal week in which he was blamed for allowing Covid to spread to care homes from NHS hospitals. 

Mr Hancock was the subject of a brutal political hit-job by former No10 aide Dominic Cummings when the former No10 aide appeared in front of MPs last week.

He accused the senior Cabinet minister of repeatedly lying and deserving to be sacked at the height of the pandemic for a catalogue of blunders. 

Mr Hancock said: ‘We started early on how we could make access to the vaccine fair.

‘I know that a few eyebrows were 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 that film, a penny did drop for me: not just that the vaccine would be our way out of the pandemic, but that the power of the vaccine would be so great that we would have to think very hard about who to protect and in what order.

‘I knew that some of the most difficult moments of the pandemic would not be before the vaccine was approved, but afterwards when the scramble for vaccines have begun.’

He added: ‘We Brits love queuing and there’s nothing more upsetting than someone jumping the queue.

‘So, again, we started planning early to make sure that this was fair and we spent time preparing for how to organise the rollout in as far away as possible.

‘The clinically advised prioritisation for getting vaccines in arms has been critical, I believe, in securing trust in the programme overall because it’s helped demonstrate that the system is fair.

‘So, we acted early to reassure people that in the finest tradition of the values of the NHS, vaccines will be given according to need, not ability to pay – whether you’re the Prime Minister, or Premier League footballer or the future king of England. You have to wait your turn, just like everyone else.’

The speech came as it was confirmed that three-quarters of adults in the UK have received their first dose of a coronavirus vaccine.

The Health Secretary praised the central role of the NHS in the vaccine success, and said the Government invested ‘at risk’ in multiple bets.

Ahead of the UK-hosted G7 Health Ministers’ Meeting later this week, Mr Hancock said: ‘Even before the first Covid-19 case arrived in the UK we’d started the work on how to develop, procure and roll out the vaccines that would ultimately make us safe.

‘I was told a vaccine had never been developed against any human coronavirus. We dared to believe … and we started early.

‘We put out a call for research in February. By March, we were supporting six different projects, including the Oxford vaccine, alongside the vital work on treatments – including the Recovery trial, which led to the discovery of dexamethasone, the first proven treatment to reduce coronavirus mortality. 

‘These two projects, together, have already saved over a million lives.’

Last week Mr Cummings accused Mr Hancock of ‘criminal, disgraceful behaviour’ during the early days of the Covid pandemic as he launched an astonishing broadside at the Health Secretary.

During a no-holds-barred attack on the senior Cabinet Minister he accused him of being a serial liar whose behaviour directly hindered the Government’s ability to tackle the pandemic last year.

In a rollercoaster appearance in front of MPs a week ago Mr Cummings outlined a series of failings by Mr Hancock and the Department of Health and Social Care and claimed that the Secretary of State should have been fired ‘for at least 15, 20 things, including lying to everybody’.

The former No10 chief adviser also alleged that the then Cabinet Secretary Lord Mark Sedwill told the Prime Minister he had lost confidence in Mr Hancock’s honesty, and urged his sacking.  

Mr Cummings told a joint committee of MPs probing the Covid crisis: ‘One thing I can say completely honestly is that I said repeatedly from February/March that if we don’t fire the Secretary of State and get testing into somebody else’s hands, we’re going to kill people and it’s going to be a catastrophe.’

In perhaps his strongest criticism, Mr Cummings told MPs that Government talk of putting a shield around care homes was ‘complete nonsense’.

‘We were told categorically in March (by Mr Hancock) that people would be tested before they went back to homes, we only subsequently found out that that hadn’t happened,’ he told the Committee.

‘Now while the Government rhetoric was we have put a shield around care homes and blah blah blah, it was complete nonsense. Quite the opposite of putting a shield around them, we sent people with Covid back to the care homes.’

Mr Hancock told the Commons the following day that the claims were ‘not true’ and he had been ‘straight with people’. 

‘We worked as hard as we could to protect people who live in care homes, and of course those who live in care homes are some of the most vulnerable to this disease because by its nature it attacks and has more of an impact on older people,’ he said.

‘Now when it comes to the testing of people as they left hospital and went into care homes, we committed to building the testing capacity to allow that to happen.

‘Of course it then takes time to build testing capacity.

‘In fact, one of the critical things we did was set the 100,000 target back then to make sure we built that testing capacity and it was very effective in doing so.

‘And then we were able to introduce the policy of testing everybody before going into care homes, but we could only do that once we had the testing capacity which I had to build, because we didn’t have it in this country from the start.

‘We started with a capacity of less than 2,000 in March last year and got to 100,000 tests a day.

‘And we set all of this out at the time in public documents. It’s all a matter of public record.’

Mr Hancock’s speech today comes ahead of the 2021 G7 Health Ministers’ Meeting, which will be held in person at Oxford University on Thursday and Friday.

It comes after no deaths within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19 were reported on Tuesday, according to the Government. It is the first time this has happened since July 30, 2020.