Our Covid legacy hangs in the balance - can we choose the spirit that drove the vaccine rollout?
4 min read
Trust is the foundation of Britain’s public health. Yet it is fracturing, and we risk reversing generations of progress.
Nearly three in 10 Britons now believe the Covid vaccine did more harm than good. Among parents, hesitancy is surging: one in six with children under four say they won’t give them the MMR jab. Measles, once nearly eradicated, is back.
Ministers point to next year’s rollout of a combined MMR-V jab as progress, but figures show the scale of the challenge. In 2024/25, none of the routine childhood vaccines hit the World Health Organization’s 95 per cent coverage benchmark. In London boroughs like Hackney, uptake is as low as 65 per cent – dangerous gaps in population immunity.
These are flashing red lights – not just a public health risk, but a communications and political failure. A failure to preserve one of the most important lessons of the pandemic: that when the state is focused, it can still deliver at speed and scale.
But before we talk about what should come next, we must remember what came before. More than 200,000 lives were lost in the UK during Covid. Families broken, livelihoods wrecked, communities scarred. These were not numbers, they were loved ones, stories, futures cut short. The grief remains. That alone should be reason enough to build a positive legacy grounded in trust, truth, and action.
The figures are stark, but they don’t point to a lost cause. They show what we’ve failed to protect: public confidence, institutional capability, and a shared sense of mission.
But out of the darkness of Covid came a rare moment of national mobilisation. The vaccine rollout wasn’t just a success; it was a global benchmark. By July 2021, over 45 million people in the UK had received at least one dose.
This wasn’t luck. It was effective statecraft. The pandemic revealed something extraordinary about British state capacity when properly directed. The Vaccine Taskforce, under Dame Kate Bingham, demonstrated that when government sets clear missions, empowers expert leadership – including from outside the public sector – and cuts through the Westminster sludge, it can deliver the seemingly impossible.
But this went beyond policy and logistics. It was people. The rollout was a triumph of delivery rooted in national will.
That spirit should be our North Star for tackling today’s defining challenges – from economic stagnation to the AI revolution. Rather than the usual Whitehall machinery of consultations, reviews, and incremental policy adjustments, we need vaccine-style taskforces.
But instead of embedding what worked, we’ve dismantled it. Short-term cost savings have been prioritised over long-term national resilience and growth. When the next pandemic strikes – and it will – we’ll look back on this strategic amnesia with regret.
Pandemic-era agility had potential far beyond healthcare. Remote working, digital collaboration, and new forms of delivery all accelerated and drove significant productivity gains across multiple sectors. Yet we’ve done little to lock in that progress.
Meanwhile, other nations have reflected and moved forward. While Sweden, Belgium, and New Zealand have concluded their Covid inquiries and begun implementing lessons, Britain has spent £124m on a drawn-out process whose most notable output so far is delay.
The moment now demands political leadership, and there are two immediate opportunities to seize it. First, the second report of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, due this autumn, will focus on government delivery and governance. Second, the government is preparing new pandemic resilience exercises, a reminder that the threat hasn’t disappeared. These are real moments to reset.
This government did not preside over the pandemic response – it has a clean slate. But moving forward doesn’t mean falling back on nostalgia. What’s needed is a positive and forward-looking vision of what the state can do when it is serious about delivery.
We must move beyond a trauma narrative toward a transformation narrative, one that sees the pandemic not just as a tragedy, but as a test case for what Britain can still achieve when government aligns with mission, expertise and public purpose.
The true legacy of Covid is not yet written. We can let vaccine scepticism and public mistrust define it, or we can reclaim the story as the moment Britain remembered how to deliver.
