[Music]
for so long
no end in sight a modern world which
thought
it made the rules cut down to size
by mother nature
humbled and frightened by unimaginable
pain
but now a destination hoving interview
for the first time since this wretched
virus took hold
we can see a route out of the pandemic
the breakthroughs in treatment in
testing vaccines
mean that the scientific cavalry is now
in psych
and we know in our hearts the next year
we will succeed a tentative start on the
journey
will be made on the 2nd of december when
the current
england-wide restrictions will be
replaced by a beefed-up
regional tiered system many more will be
in the higher tiers all areas in the
highest tier
will be given extra testing for six
weeks
by which time a nationwide vaccination
program
should be underway and over christmas
a careful relaxation of some
rules i know that many of us
want and need christmas uh with our
families we feel
after this year we deserve it
but this is not the moment to let the
virus rip
for the sake of christmas parties it is
the season to be jolly but
it is also the season to be jolly
careful
especially with elderly relatives
it felt at times today as if there were
two boris johnsons
appearing from his self-isolation lair
here in downing street
tonight a highly cautious prime minister
adopted a downbeat tone as he warned the
country
of a hard slog ahead but earlier a more
boosterish prime minister was beamed
into parliament as he sought to reassure
conservative mps
who are highly skeptical of continuing
restrictions
a former health minister sees slow moves
towards a happier place this is about
putting together
the vaccine the testing and the improved
test track
and isolate to make sure that we can get
safely through to the spring
when hopefully through science we can
achieve some sort of herd immunity
and i think that's the best hope that
we've got right now there are many many
forks
left in the road many bends many people
feel like they're going round the bend
many of us do in 2020 the year that just
keeps on giving
but there is cautious signs for real
optimism
and hope labor says it's important
to be cautious well i think it's right
that we give people hope because it's
been a terrible year
for everyone and we want some light at
the end of the tunnel but
equally we can't afford to send the
message out that the virus is beaten
because it certainly isn't and we know
it's going to be
considerable amount of time possibly six
months or more before everyone will be
vaccinated and that's really the point
that we need to get to before we can be
confident that we've actually got over
this
a leading scientist believes this may be
one of science's finest hours
oh but the whole scientific response to
this pandemic has been quite
extraordinary i mean the very fact that
it was identified in sequence within
weeks of it becoming clinically apparent
all the way through to developing the
diagnostics and i mean it's been
difficult to roll them out
but the idea that you could go from an
unknown
infection to a sequenced virus
to a diagnostic to a vaccine in this
period is quite unprecedented it
wouldn't have been possible
even five or ten years ago
a crisp feel to the air and reassuring
sights on our streets
but still some way to go until normal
life
returns
that was nick watt and joining us now
professor sir john bell regis chair of
medicine at oxford university
who sits on the uk vaccines task force
and lord robert winston labor peer and
professor of science and society
at imperial college london it's great to
have you both
um so john i'm going to start with you
it does feel like
oxford's day to day and the pm said this
is our route
out of the pandemic is that how you feel
now
well i i as you know i'm quite
optimistic that we'll
get ourselves out of trouble sometime
over the course of the next few months
um i've made the prediction in the
spring
uh before things start to appear to be
normal again and i think that's about
the right timing we've got three
vaccines now we've got mass testing
which
appears to work pretty well we've got a
lot of we've got a lot of
arrows in the quiver that we can shoot
so i'm
fairly optimistic that things will start
to move in the right direction now
were you always optimistic or am i right
in thinking that you
at one point you had doubts that you
would ever get here
well i i i wasn't sure we were going to
get a vaccine if you want to know the
honest truth
i i always put the odds of that of being
50
because it's hard to make vaccines to
respiratory pathogens this was not a
given
uh and the way things were bumping along
at the beginning
uh it wasn't clear that the testing was
going to go well
um therapies were hard to find
it it was a bad time last
spring but uh i think now we've got
reason to be optimistic
let me ask you to explain this the 70
versus the 90 effectiveness which i
think
a lot of people um might be confused by
we've we've heard you know with pfizer
with modern of the other vaccines that
there is a higher rate
now presumably people won't be given a
choice
will they when the vaccine comes round
or if you could choose between
higher efficacy but lower side effects i
mean
how does that work yeah so so just to be
clear
they the uh pfizer vaccine and the
modern vaccines are terrific vaccines
they're a brand new platform and
i think the level of efficacy they've
achieved is extraordinary and
and terrific uh but the truth is you
don't need that kind of efficacy
to have an effective vaccine that flu
vaccines run out about 60
efficacy so you know you don't need to
get there and
i think the most important thing about
the vaccine
uh the oxford uh astrazeneca vaccine is
that
when we looked at people both with the
low dose and the high dose
both the 70 which is the high dose high
dose and the
90 which is the low dose high dose and
we looked for people
who developed severe disease we didn't
have any in
either group so it's highly effective at
preventing people
from being admitted to hospital with bad
disease which is
what we intended to have in the first
place so
we could have a theoretical argument
about one's why one's better than the
other
uh but the truth is uh they're both
pretty good at doing what we want to do
lord winston this looks like the bet has
paid off this is
pretty much vindication of the the whole
strategy isn't it
well it's certainly a remarkable
achievement there's no doubt about that
and it's congratulations to oxford and
the other universities i think one of
the
really interesting things is that this
is one of the first times that we've
seen it in recent years and i can
remember where university
the university is really in fact taking
things right through to a product
which is then actually capable of used
for healthcare usually this is done by
big pharma and other companies so this
is
this is amazing too for our academic
sector but i'm i'm a bit
concerned about the the risk of hubris
without the risk of being
over optimistic i think the problem is
not that the scientists
i think the science is great but i i
regret to say that when you look back
over the last eight or nine months the
government has not really been trusted
and it still
isn't trusted it's not it's interested
in messaging but is not interested
in communication and i think that's a
real problem because so much of the time
we're getting top-down messages which
aren't really intelligible
and we've seen a series of debacles for
example we've seen
test and trace which was the shambles
we've seen problems with
healthcare workers being exposed
unnecessarily to the virus and so on
and i think that's a real problem now
because there are a lot of young people
who are really
very very skeptical and somewhat
suspicious and so we've got to
do something about that because of
course so skeptical to the point where
they wouldn't
take the vaccine is that your fear well
i think well there are a lot of
anti-vaxxers around you and you have to
look at
the social media to see that that's a
that's a problem for start
but i suppose one of the issues of
course is that you know there's a
there's an ethical difference
as as sir john will tell you between
giving a vaccine from giving a normal
drug because
with a vaccine you're treating a vast
number of people
tens of thousands hundreds of thousands
perhaps even more
but of course those are well people that
not being treated for an illness that
they've yet got
so there's a big issue we saw that with
mmr
actually to some extent i mean that was
a long time ago we
you know history relates what happened
there sir john the pm said that this is
never going to be mandatory so
do you have that same concern how do you
make people want it do you i mean i
think the australian airline qantas has
said for example
it will be a necessity for flying with
them is that how you do it do you make
employers
insist on it head teachers insist on it
yeah so i'm i'm very firmly against
mandation i think
mandation is not a good way to to bring
people along with you i mean it works
well in some societies but it doesn't
work well here
nor would it work in north america so i
think you do have to persuade people to
come along
having said that we may get to a
position
where it's necessary in order to control
transmission to know who's protected
from developing the disease and who
isn't
and and that protection could come in
one of two ways one is you could have
had the disease and i think there's now
increasing evidence that if you've had
the disease
uh and you've had a positive pcr test
then you are protected against the
disease for a period of time and
i'll i'll leave that open but it's
probably at least six months probably a
year
and then if you get a vaccine you'll be
protected against the disease so
it may be necessary for some activities
to require people to be able to show
that they are
protected against the disease or have
recently had a test in order for that to
go back
to relatively normal functions so i i
think
all this has to play out the big issues
now relate really
and and i think uh lord winston has
hit the nail on the head a lot of this
is policy related now
it's how do you implement the best
approach to getting
this all across definition the science
has sort of done its job
but it it can't operate on its own it's
got to operate in a policy framework
so it's over to um professor of science
and society
the behavior and what that involves how
how confident are you then that this
rollout can be
i don't you call me a labour peer i mean
i
i do take the whip just about but i must
have to say to you
that i do feel quite i think
independently that the government has
certainly over promised and
underperformed and i think that's a big
problem here
because of course if we i mean it's
inevitable you're going to get some
people with worse side effects than
others with any kind of
any kind of medication however simple
even aspirin
so the risk of course is that you then
start to really create
mistrust as the rumors go round and i
think that's a big problem
because of course you can disturb a lot
of people who are already very very
anxious about a highly puzzling disease
which has so many different faces
attacking so many different organs in
different people
i i wonder what the answer to that is
though i mean you can't
you can't stop people talking about side
effects if of course we can't and we
shouldn't that's the point i don't think
we should
but i think you know what we can learn
is from history
we've seen nuclear power was very badly
handled because we lied about the risk
of emissions
you know of radioactivity with with mmr
of course we really didn't get the
message across with the measles vaccine
and with put and mouth and with bsc uh
with
genetically modified crops is a
wonderful example of a really good
technology which we mishandled
with very poor communication and also
commercial interests in that particular
case yes
so i think we have to be aware that
we've got to be really a bit more we've
got to be
not the scientist i think everybody has
to be modest and actually just be
i mean i don't think that means for
example we stopped taking precautions
simply because we've got a vaccine
and i think that's one of the issues
we've got to think about and do you
think
can i put the same uh thought to you sir
john
when we're now talking about christmas
and what that might entail and and the
start of
sort of opening up getting a few
families together and all the rest of it
we don't know the exact details yet
does that seem to you like running
before we can
walk given that we're so close well i
i look i'm i i'm of the view that we've
got to be pretty cautious for the next
little while it's going to be some time
before we get a significant
number of the population immunized and
you only have to look at how quickly
this disease can spread
to realize that we do have to try and
keep the lid on this thing for a while
longer
now having said that the population you
know this
the people in this country have had a
really really terrible year
i'm really from february on people have
lost their jobs they've lost
they've had loved ones die they've been
locked up in their homes they haven't
been able to do the usual things that
they do
i mean it's been pretty awful so i i my
view is that loosing it up for a few
days over christmas
will undoubtedly lead to a bit of an
increase in the transmission of the
disease
but i you know i think there's a point
at which you probably have to
let it loose a bit in order to keep
people going
through until march or april okay thank
you both very much indeed thanks for
coming in