I Teach at Oxford, But I Don’t Want It to Win the Coronavirus Vaccine Race

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Oxford, that symbol of British excellence. Producing the finest minds in the world and, if this week’s news is anything to go by, leading the race to develop a vaccine against Coronavirus.

Surely I should be proud that the institution I have spent a decade studying and subsequently teaching at, could be the first to develop the vaccine?

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So why was my initial relief at hearing Oxford and Imperial are racing away to develop the vaccine followed by worry?

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We’ll forget the lessons that the pandemic has taught us so far: that the UK and the US are in fact not exceptions at the global stage. That we are not only vulnerable but can also afford to learn lessons from countries, regardless of whether we have a special relationship with them – such as South Korea. That being white, male and Oxford-educated may not be the only criteria for effective leadership (the countries whose responses have been most widely praised, Germany and New Zealand among others, are all led by women).

The developments made by researchers at Oxford have been enabled by international co-operation among the research community. Whilst China has faced lots of questions about it’s sharing of information politically, according to Laura Spinney: “The unprecedented speed of virus development so far is thanks in large part to early Chinese efforts to sequence the genetic material of Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. China shared that sequence in early January, allowing research groups around the world to grow the live virus and study how it invades human cells and makes people sick.”

{snip} It is clear, then, that international co-operation saves lives.

But do our Oxford-educated leaders think like this? Coronavirus is a global epidemic. Yet, rather than motivating the UK to take a proud role at the global stage, as leaders like Macron have urged, the UK is increasingly resorting to patriotism in response.

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The race is on and researchers at Oxford are doing vital, life-saving work. But races have winners and losers. If my university is the first to develop the vaccine, I’m worried that it will be used as it has been in the past, to fulfil its political, patriotic function as proof of British excellence.

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