“All this talk about the UK becoming a serious science superpower is a dead end,” Dame Kate Bingham told the Observer. “These people don’t really care. If you really want to make our clinical research robust, you don’t start dismantling what’s been put in place.” Bingham’s dramatic outbreak follows a decision by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) to insist that volunteers already registered on a national database of people wishing to take part in medical research must now go through a complex, three – step-by-step verification process to reapply to stay in the program. Bingham, who described the NIHR’s move as “ludicrous”, said the database was set up in spring 2020 so the UK would have a pool of volunteers ready and waiting to sign up for trials once vaccine candidates were developed Covid by researchers. Kate Bingham called the NIHR changes “ridiculous”. Photo: ITV/Rex “We enrolled 550,000 people and about 50,000 of them were later used in 18 different vaccine trials for seven different companies. So it was incredibly effective.” Crucially, when the program was established, a clause was added to ask the volunteers who signed up if they would also agree to participate in medical trials that did not involve research into Covid: 94% said they would. “This has created an extremely valuable resource for the nation,” said Bingham, who became famous for her work on Britain’s leading Covid vaccine taskforce. The bureaucratic hurdles they had to overcome were huge, but “now the bureaucracy has taken over again – it’s a problem,” he added. “NIHR staff are going back to everyone on the database and telling them they will have to re-register in a complicated process involving three separate steps and the exchange of verification emails. “Only after that will the previous volunteers re-register.” Bingham said she had gone through the re-registration process herself and found it complicated and unhelpful. “It’s just a monumental way to lose a lot of people from the database,” he said. “They had half a million people who were willing to participate in all kinds of medical research programs. But there’s no way they’re getting that number of people to sign up again. It’s a total waste.” A managing director at venture capital firm SV Health Investors, Bingham was hailed for her work to ensure the UK was quickly supplied with ample doses of Covid vaccines in the midst of the pandemic. But she has since been sharply critical of the civil servant culture she experienced when she was asked to lead the UK’s vaccine task force. “The problem is that civil servants focus on the process rather than the outcome,” he told the Observer. “There are simpler ways to keep all these volunteers in the database without making them go through this complicated re-registration. It’s clear: we should invest in research infrastructure, not dismantle it.” In a speech last year, Bingham said there was “little relevant scientific and business expertise across government, a culture of low performance in delivering results and a mistrustful and often dysfunctional relationship between government and the life sciences industry”. The problem was particularly worrying today, Bingham added, because the UK was not yet “out of the woods” in dealing with the Covid pandemic. Current vaccines do not prevent transmission and do not provide protection for very long, he argued. “We must continue to test and develop new formats and new approaches and be prepared for the new variations that are likely to emerge in the coming months and years. So why waste this pool of people who have already said they will help. It just seems crazy.” The NIHR said it was making the move to create a new and better register to help people with all conditions and added that it was important to ask people to give new consent for any new voluntary service. An NIHR spokesman said the new service ‘builds on learning from the Vaccine Register and has improved functionality. It will also help support research into a whole variety of health conditions and treatments.”
