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It is vital to learn the lessons from the COVID pandemic - and that will be helped by the Commons Science and Technology Committee's look at what has gone well and what hasn't.

Vaccines are a huge success, of course.

The UK has more vaccines pre-purchased per head than any other country, and yesterday's world-first rollout of the Pfizer-BioNTech jab is a direct result of the early call made by the government's chief scientist that they would be the way out of the pandemic.

Within the next few months it is likely there will be several vaccines approved and in use, with doctors having to choose which to use. It's a nice problem to have.

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But there are other aspects where the government's response has been inadequate.

The lack of testing capacity meant the authorities lost sight of the virus in the spring, allowing it to spread widely, below the radar.

By the time capacity increased, it was too late for contact tracing and self-isolation to bring the pandemic back under control.

The decision to lockdown in the spring was also taken too late. A delay of just a week may well have cost something like 20,000 lives.

A vaccine that could save Britain

So there are questions to be asked about the accuracy of the pandemic modelling and whether the government responded quickly enough to the steep rise in cases.

Of course an inquiry has the benefit of hindsight, so the question for MPs on the science and technology and the health select committees is whether the government and its advisers responded appropriately, based on the information they had at the time.

This was a new virus that was poorly understood. The science evolved and advice changed - for example on face masks - and that's a reasonable evidence-based approach.

But Asian countries lost no time in preparing for a significant outbreak when China warned of an emerging virus. The UK, and to be fair, some other European countries, just didn't believe a coronavirus was a threat.

A lot of the government's problems are down to transparency and communication. Mixed and confusing messages undermine public trust in the social distancing rules that make absolute sense from a health perspective, but come at the cost of our liberty.

There is a lot that needs to be done better in the next pandemic, and the good result on vaccines doesn't let the government off the hook.