WATCH: UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s Weird COVID Interview Still Has Everyone Talking

Footage from the UK rocketed around the world earlier this week and gave people a much-needed dose of optimism, following news that the world’s first coronavirus vaccinations had begun to be administered there. In fact, one such Briton — a 91-year-old man named Martin Kenyon — went viral when CNN caught up with him to ask what the experience of getting a COVID-19 vaccine was like. Kenyon was quintessentially British, in that warm, cheerio, keep calm and carry on manner that outsiders tend to associate with the nation. At one point, after recounting his “rather nasty lunch” and that he’d had a bit of trouble parking, Kenyon remarked dryly that that the jab was so fast that he “didn’t know the needle had gone in until it had come out.”

All of which is to say, we get it. Everyone is on edge right now. Nerves are frayed. We’re desperate for a light at the end of the tunnel, and, thankfully, the first doses of the vaccine are finally being given out — both in Europe and now in the US, following Friday’s approval by the FDA of an emergency use authorization for Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine candidate.

At the same time, it would be a mistake to forget that after living through this pandemic for almost a year now, people are beyond angry. It’s hard not to feel that entire populations have been lied to, forgotten about, shortchanged, and buffeted by one round of strange new public health rules after another as officials try to figure out what’s what relative to the virus. Everyone could do with some humility right about now, which also means that when it comes to most politicians, this is no time to take a victory lap or do any of the usual performative politicking.

Which brings us to UK health secretary Matt Hancock.

Everybody is still talking an interview he gave to ITV’s Good Morning Britain, in which Matt Hancock cries — or, rather, appears to. The footage is but the latest bit of viral fodder he’s supplied, like the time last year when he was filmed standing awkwardly close to a Conservative party candidate and fixated on her as the cameras rolled.

This time around, Hancock appeared to be wiping his eyes when extolling how marvelous it feels to be British or something, after a discussion of how the second Briton to get the coronavirus vaccine was a man named William Shakespeare.

“You know, it’s been such a tough year for so many people,” the secretary said.

“I’ve still got this worry that we can’t blow it now … We’ve still got to get the vaccine to millions of people. And so we’ve got to keep sticking by the rules. But there’s so much work gone into this and it makes you proud to be British.”

Needless to say, social media users in Britain, perhaps fed up with a government response to the pandemic that’s seemed either consistently behind the curve throughout the crisis or alternately overbearing, weren’t having it. “Matt Hancock forgot the golden rule of pretending to cry on national television,” one tweeter noted, “which is to produce at least one discernible tear.”

This episode can actually be regarded as something of an instructive moment, for political leaders to understand that the scope and scale of the coronavirus pandemic is such that using the media for anything less than straightforward communication with the public is liable to backfire spectacularly. It’s a lesson that leaders in Britain, the US and elsewhere would do well to heed, especially with governments like the UK’s preparing to embark upon a massive public vaccination campaign of tens of millions of people within a matter of months. The public will rely on the media to convey timely and authoritative information from government leaders. Crocodile tears, it should go without saying, simply won’t do.