The military commander tasked with speeding up Covid vaccine roll-out
The military commander behind the lightning-fast construction of the NHS Nightingale hospitals is now leading the Armed Forces’ bid to speed up the coronavirus vaccine roll-out.
Brigadier Phil Prosser of the Royal Logistics Corps has been embedded for weeks at the NHS headquarters in Elephant and Castle, South London, to work alongside the head of the jab task force.
Taking a central role in the programme’s delivery, he chairs the 8am daily vaccine meeting and is preparing to dispatch military “surge teams” to ensure the mass jab roll-out runs to timetable.
On Thursday night he stood alongside the Prime Minister and Sir Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, at a televised Downing Street press conference to set out the Armed Forces' next moves.
A crisis management expert, the military officer commands 101 Logistic Brigade, a unit represented by a snake logo that is known as the “Iron Viper” among its own personnel, but often dubbed the “Blackadders” by waggish rivals.
The latter nickname derives from an earlier formation of the unit taking seed at Baldrick Lines, a British camp in the First Gulf War and the name of a leading character in the eighties TV sitcom Blackadder.
Brigadier Prosser, described by friends as a proud Welshman, is a cycling enthusiast and committed fan of the Scarlets, the Llanelli rugby team.
His challenge to help Boris Johnson fulfil an ambitious pledge to administer 13 million jabs by mid-February comes after he was last year tasked with setting up at breakneck speed the Nightingale temporary hospitals to boost NHS intensive care unit capacity.
His Aldershot-based brigade, which includes logistical, engineering and medical personnel, also oversaw the delivery of tens of thousands of items of personal protective equipment to hospitals in desperate need last March.
A convoy of Army trucks from the unit worked through the night to deliver 50,000 face masks to St Thomas’ hospital in London from a depot in Haydock, Cheshire, on one occasion.
He has had help in his endeavours during the pandemic – drawing on the expertise of a range of corporate leaders who moonlight as reservists in the Engineer and Logistic Staff Corps, described as the “greatest military unit you’ve never heard of”.
This includes advice on the high-speed scaling up of NHS supply chains from Neil Ashworth, a former chief executive of Yodel, and logistical support from Martin Frobisher, an executive at Network Rail.
Commissioned into the Royal Electrical Mechanical Engineers in 1992, Brigadier Prosser has served with a variety of units and completed operational tours of Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan.
In 2010-11 he attended the Advanced Command Staff Course for military officers tipped for senior leadership roles. Since then he has overseen moves by a battalion to revitalise 100 vehicles mothballed in long-term storage for a major Nato exercise in Poland, and also led on the design and delivery of a combat service support exercise in Kenya.
Married to Shani, a physiotherapist, the couple have an eight-year-old daughter, Emily Mai.
