Who’d want the job of vaccinating the nation?

Is that a light at the end of the tunnel — or a second lockdown thundering unstoppably towards us? News of a viable vaccine is the one development in the Covid drama that could drag the national mood out of the current despair that’s pulverising economic recovery; it would also provoke a euphoric stock market rally. And it’s clearly getting closer. But how close?

The chance of a magic potion for Christmas remains ‘slim’, according to Vaccine Taskforce chair Kate Bingham; spring next year is a safer bet, says chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance, adding that ‘we should not overpromise’. He’s right there: the worst thing ministers could do — worse than any Covid cock-up so far — would be to create expectations of swift vaccination for the old, the vulnerable, and frontline workers, then fail to deliver.

So a crescendo of ‘vaccine breakthrough’ stories will be met, for the time being, by Downing Street discouragement — no doubt denying, for example, that Matt Hancock recently gave some Tory backbenchers the impression that eight million jabs could take place in December. That’s not impossible if the drug giant Pfizer is really gearing up to distribute 100 million doses to major customers, including the NHS. But how far will we be knocked back if Donald Trump has ordered US officials to buy all available doses — ‘leaving none for Britain’, according to one breathless report — of the rival AstraZeneca-Oxford version?

If news management will be tricky, the logistics of the vaccination programme itself will be incomparably more demanding, with media attention swiftly turning to the question of who’s fit to take charge of it. As a career life-sciences investor, Kate Bingham knows about drug development but not, we might guess, about mass distribution. And like Baroness Harding of Test and Trace, whose husband is a Tory MP, Bingham will be open to jibes that she happens to be the wife of Treasury minister Jesse Norman.