It was in the weeks before the G7 Summit, to be held by Britain in Cornwall, that the penny finally dropped among government officials. Covid was top of the agenda. World leaders would be meeting to discuss a global plan of action for tackling the pandemic. As hosts, the UK needed to be seen leading the way. “There was a classic kind of, ‘S***, what are we going to announce? We need to pretend we’re doing something’,” says a former member of the Vaccine Task Force, who was involved in discussions.

       Cue the eventual announcement that the UK, having raced to procure its vast supply of doses to the detriment of the global south, would now be donating 100 million of its jabs. “In doing so, we will take a massive step towards beating this pandemic for good,” prime minister Boris Johnson said at the time.

       Nearly nine months later, roughly 43 million surplus jabs have been shipped abroad. The clock is ticking. Despite its contributions to the surge in vaccine nationalism that underpinned the early western response to Covid, splitting the world into the protected and unprotected divide we see today, the UK has a long way to go in cleaning up the mess it helped to make.