UK Covid vaccine taskforce head 'charging taxpayer £670,000 for PR consultants'

Specialists hired to oversee media strategy amid search for immunity

The head of the UK's vaccine taskforce has hired eight public relations consultants at a cost to the taxpayer of £670,000, according to leaked documents seen by The Sunday Times.

Kate Bingham, who was appointed to chair the group by Boris Johnson, reportedly "insisted" on hiring the team from London agency Admiral Associates.

The consultants have been overseeing her media strategy since June at the equivalent salary of £167,000 a year each, it is claimed.

However it remains unclear what work the team have done that could not have been handled by existing communications staff at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).

TheTimes reported one government source as saying that the consultants had helped her prepare for interviews, assisted with press statements and set up an official government podcast.

Ms Bingham has so far appeared on eight episodes of "Covid-19 The Search for a Vaccine", which has a rating of 4.7 stars on Apple. Its last outing on 26 October considered the issues surrounding human challenge trials.

BEIS did not deny the Times report but made no comment. However, it is understood that Admiral Associates were chosen because of their experience working with healthcare companies, hospitals and universities.

Details of the contract should be published online by the department at a later date.

Ms Bingham is managing director of private equity firm SV Health Investors and the wife of Tory Treasury minister Jesse Norman.

As chair of the taskforce, she is leading the effort to find and manufacture a Covid-19 vaccine.

However, last week it was reported she had shared government plans at a networking event for female financiers in the US.

The government denied any wrongdoing and claimed that all information shared had been cleared for release by Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy.

“Kate Bingham focused on publicly available information and said little that expert delegates at the conference could not deduce themselves,” a government statement said at the time.

At the time of her appointment, the government claimed Ms Bingham was "uniquely qualified for the role having worked in the biotech sector in the UK and internationally for 26 years".

Last week she told MPs that it was likely that nationwide deployment of a vaccine could begin in December and that she was more than 50 per cent confident that all vulnerable people will have been vaccinated against coronavirus by Easter or early summer.