They had to go and ruin it, didn’t they? Here is a great moment for humanity: lovely people getting a vaccination against a deadly virus that has been developed with breathtaking rapidity. And what is the image that has been injected into our brains where it will lodge like a parasite? Matt Hancock pretend-crying on Good Morning Britain like a no-hoper auditioning for clown school.
The health secretary staged his bizarre pantomime presumably because the simple emotions that any sane person might be feeling – relief, hope, a tinge of wonder at the extraordinary ingenuity of which our species is capable – are not enough. Another layer of sentiment must be slathered on.
As throughout the pandemic, that extra coating is a thick overlay of phoney patriotism. The grim reality of being the first country in Europe to pass 50,000 deaths from Covid-19 must be somehow cancelled by the boast of being the first in the world to begin vaccinating against it.
A spectacularly international event has to become a nationalist parable. Thus, Tuesday became V-Day, the name chosen to resonate with VE Day that marked the end of the second world war in Europe. The first man to receive the vaccine was William Shakespeare – presumably because no one called Winston Churchill was available. Didn’t one of those blokes say something about protesting too much?
The obvious question is: what’s so great about going first? Objectively, very little is really gained by jumping ahead of other countries by a few weeks. The UK has 800,000 doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine – enough for 400,000 people. There are 3.2 million people aged 80 or over in the UK. So even if all the available doses went to this age group (which they won’t), just 12.5% of the most vulnerable cohort will be vaccinated in this first wave.
This is not nothing – and the psychological boost for everyone around the world is considerable. But there are also very good reasons for caution. Some of these are strictly scientific. The European Medicine Agency, which will decide whether to approve the Pfizer vaccine by 29 December, believes that its longer approval procedure, with further checks and bigger data, is more appropriate.
Perhaps more important, though, is the need to persuade the general public that the vaccine – and the ones that will follow shortly – are safe. The ultra-fast British approval process has released a sugar rush of euphoria. But the longer-term need is for reassurance. Many people are wary, and the anti-vaxxers will play on their anxieties. Being able to show that every possible precaution has been taken is a vital weapon in this war for hearts and minds.
While the integrity of the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency is not in doubt, neither is the political pressure to declare a win for Britain. It comes from two related sources. One is the requirement for a celebratory story to distract from the incompetence and cronyism that have marked the Johnson administration’s overall response to the pandemic. The other is, of course, Brexit.
It is striking, for example, that the phrase “world-beating” was hardly ever used in the Westminster parliament before 2020. In all of 2019, it appeared 21 times. But since 1 July this year, it has been brandished 148 times. It has, one might say, gone viral in political discourse, precisely because it is a key part of the government’s strategy to vaccinate itself against justified criticism.
It is also part of the Brexit narrative of a British greatness that has no need of European normality. When Jacob Rees-Mogg, for example, declares that “the UK’s pharmaceutical industry is world-beating”, the message is not that Britain has a terrific cluster of world-class scientists. It is that in the perpetual game of Britain versus a Rest of the World XI, there is only ever going to be one winner.
The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine declined to play ball. It was designed in Germany by a team led by the children of the kind of Turkish migrants the Brexiters, in the 2016 referendum, promised to keep out of Britain. It has been developed by a US-based multinational. And it is manufactured in Belgium. Just as a very hard Brexit is about to become reality, the vaccine’s ancestry undermines “our island story” of “standing alone”. It looks suspiciously like a rootlessly cosmopolitan citizen of nowhere.
How does a political discourse addicted to being world-beating instead of world-class inoculate itself against these subversive implications? It reaches for the only kind of exceptionalism that is available: being first, not in substance but merely in time.
This is in fact very like the “moonshot” that also became part of the government’s lexicon. Boris Johnson’s Operation Moonshot was supposed to produce a (what else?) “world-beating” test and trace system. But never mind. The point of the original moonshot was not really to land on the moon. It was to land on the moon before the other lot got there. Being first is everything.
For everybody else, the race has been against the virus. For the Johnson regime, it seems, the race is against everybody else. That way of thinking is especially risible when you didn’t even build the rocket.
But it’s also rather sad. Confident countries don’t need to prove their greatness to themselves by building their very own Olympic podiums and presenting themselves with gold medals. They don’t need to suck the joy out of a great achievement for humanity by wrapping it in red, white and blue. We’ve all shed enough real tears this year – spare us the fake patriotic ones.
Fintan O’Toole is a columnist with the Irish Times
