I have recently discovered that one of the more remarkable things to come out of the pandemic was a Lloyd’s syndicate named in honour of a cow.
This is a sentence I never expected to write, even in Sunday Nonsense, and I appreciate that those of you outside the insurance market may now be wondering quite what sort of organisation we are running here.
But bear with me, because this is a rather wonderful story.
The pandemic. For a while we all became amateur epidemiologists, developed strong opinions about toilet rolls, and spent a surprising amount of time watching people on television explain which activities were and weren’t permitted – and wonder for god’s sake why did no one buy Chris Witty a clicker.
Next slide please.
The country ran out of flour, everybody started making sourdough, and some very well meaning but ultimately tiring bores invented the Zoom quiz. I think we should be prepared to forgive most of what happened in 2020, but I draw the line at that last one.
Of course, underneath all the absurdity, something terribly sad was happening. A friend of mine went more than a year unable to see their mother, who was undergoing cancer treatment. The danger of bringing COVID into her home was simply too great. Imagine loving somebody so much that the kindest thing you can do is stay away from them when you need each other the most.
And there were millions of people with stories like that. Grandparents who couldn’t meet their grandchildren, families separated by closed borders, people unable to visit loved ones in hospital, and an entire world discovering that the ordinary pleasure of sitting around a table together wasn’t quite so ordinary after all.
We desperately needed a way out. Fortunately, the world’s scientists were working on one, and in an extraordinary achievement they developed vaccines against a disease which had barely existed in our consciousness a year earlier.
There was, however, a problem.
Having invented the vaccine, you then had to get it to people. All of them. Everywhere.
Now, transporting medicines is rather more complicated than sending somebody a parcel, and we all know how EvRi excels at buggering even that up. Some of the new vaccines needed to be stored at temperatures approaching minus 70 degrees Celsius, which would defeat my freezer before we’d even reached the end of the drive. They had to travel through factories, warehouses, airports, distribution centres and refrigerated vehicles, frequently crossing international borders and sometimes going to places where reliable refrigeration and transport infrastructure were difficult to come by.
One broken refrigerator, a lengthy delay or an unfortunate encounter with a loading bay in the middle of summer could spoil a valuable shipment. You couldn’t simply leave several million doses behind somebody’s wheelie bin and send them a photograph to prove delivery.
And there was another problem. All this extraordinarily valuable, temperature-sensitive cargo needed insurance. Not simply to pay for something if it went wrong, but to give the organisations responsible for the shipments confidence that they could manage the risks involved.
Which brings us, I must admit predictably, to the Lloyd’s market.
In July 2020, when nobody had yet approved a COVID vaccine, the market announced its in-principle approval of a new specialist syndicate to insure the storage and transportation of vaccines to emerging economies. Working with Parsyl, Ascot, brokers, insurers and public-sector partners, the initiative developed into the Global Health Risk Facility, launched that December.
I love the fact that while scientists around the world were racing to develop a vaccine, people in our market were already worrying about their duty. Humanity was facing the greatest public health emergency in centuries, and somewhere in the Lloyd’s market people were thinking about making sure the thing that would save us got there safely before it was even invented.
I hope I have mentioned just how much I adore the character of this market. I feel confident I have, as every time I go to Lloyd’s I want to tell everyone from the lovely people on reception, the camera room, and the people working in the new Lloyd’s Coffee House, just how important their work is – because this market is all of us.
Anyway, sorry – we rather went off at a tangent there didn’t we – the syndicate they created began underwriting in January 2021, helping protect the transportation and storage of vaccines and other essential medical supplies, particularly in countries where obtaining suitable insurance could be challenging. By 2023, the wider facility reported more than a billion dollars’ worth of insured health commodities. Not just COVID vaccines, but medicines and diagnostic products for other diseases too, because unfortunately the rest of the world’s medical problems hadn’t decided to work from home until the pandemic wore off.
But here’s the bit that delighted me.
They gave the Syndicate the number 1796.
Now, if you work around Lloyd’s, you’ll know that syndicate numbers are terribly important. We throw them around in conversation as though everybody is expected to know what they mean. Somebody can casually mention four digits over lunch, and you are apparently supposed to know the managing agent, the active underwriter and what they had for breakfast.
But 1796 wasn’t a random collection of digits.
It was a tribute to a remarkable event in Gloucestershire, 224 years earlier.
In May 1796, a doctor named Edward Jenner became interested in the observation that milkmaids who had contracted cowpox appeared to be protected against smallpox, a disease which had killed enormous numbers of people throughout history.
One of these milkmaids was Sarah Nelmes, who had caught cowpox from a cow called Blossom. Jenner took material from a sore on Sarah’s hand and used it to inoculate an eight-year-old boy named James Phipps, the son of his gardener. He subsequently demonstrated that James was protected against smallpox.
Of course, medical research ethics have advanced somewhat since 1796. If you submitted a proposal to Compliance tomorrow involving an infectious disease, an eight-year-old boy and a cow, I suspect at best you’d be asked to provide rather more documentation.
Nevertheless, Jenner’s work became a pivotal moment in the development of vaccination, one of the greatest medical advances in human history. Smallpox would eventually become the first human disease eradicated through vaccination.
Blossom, meanwhile, appears never to have received a Nobel Prize. I appreciate they weren’t introduced until 1901, but I’m not sure I consider that a valid excuse.
And when, more than two centuries later, Lloyd’s helped establish a syndicate to support the distribution of vaccines during another terrible pandemic, the people behind it chose to remember that amazing year.
1796.
I find that great. Not the year an insurance company was founded, or a particularly successful underwriting result, but the year of a medical breakthrough which helped change the course of human history.
There’s something even more wonderful about the reason the syndicate existed.
Because nobody was sitting at home during lockdown wishing somebody would establish a public-private insurance facility for temperature-sensitive medical commodities. Not even those of us who work in insurance, although I imagine a few marine underwriters and my head of MET were getting quite excited.
People wanted to see their families. They wanted to visit their parents, meet their grandchildren, celebrate birthdays, attend weddings, sit in a crowded pub and complain about the price of a pint. They wanted the extraordinary luxury of doing ordinary things again.
I think about my friend, separated from their mother during her cancer treatment, and all the other families who spent months wondering when it might finally be safe to see the people they loved.
Vaccines helped change that. Not overnight, not perfectly, and not without an enormous effort from scientists, manufacturers, health workers, governments and countless other people. But they helped us begin to reclaim the lives that had been put on hold.
And before the first vaccine had even been approved, our market had already begun preparing to help that extraordinary undertaking succeed.
We didn’t discover the vaccines, manufacture them or administer the injections. What our market did was something different, and something it has been doing for more than three centuries. It brought together people with the expertise, ingenuity and willingness to take on risks that needed to be taken.
It helped protect a part of the journey between a scientific breakthrough and the people waiting for it.
Think about what that journey meant. Not in dollars of insured cargo, or the number of policies written, but in the things that gradually became possible again. The family dinner. The visit to a parent. The grandchild meeting a grandparent. The front door opening to somebody who hadn’t been able to walk through it for far too long.
The world didn’t reopen because of an insurance policy. But the worldwide effort that helped it reopen depended on thousands of people solving thousands of different problems, and the Lloyd’s market stepped forward to help solve some of them.
Before the vaccines had even been approved, we were already preparing to help get them where they needed to go.
And we did it through a syndicate named after an eight-year-old boy, a Gloucestershire doctor and a cow called Blossom.
Officially, we were insuring vaccines and medical supplies. But I think our market had accidently discovered an entirely new class of business.
Happiness.
I think our market is simply magnificent.
Because sometimes the greatest thing our market does isn’t paying to put something back together after disaster strikes. Sometimes it’s helping the rest of the world do something extraordinary in the first place.
And sometimes, if we’re very fortunate, that extraordinary thing is giving people back something they thought they might have lost.
The chance to be together again.
Have a good week,
Rob
P.S. I was in the rather spectacular lifts in that building next to the Starbucks on Leadenhall St this week, with two underwriters – both of whom subscribe to the Nonsense on the blog, but only one of whom knew it was by me. “Do you think he actually writes them” one said to the chap who knew me. For a fraction of a fraction of a second I caught my friend’s eye, who replied “oh trust me, if you knew him… if anything he’s toning it down” That was a long ride to G11 without smirking.
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