 It's been a strange three days in politics because for once it's been filled with a decent amount of good news. On Saturday we had the end of Trump. Today we might have the end of COVID-19. Yes, this is the news that a vaccine for COVID-19 has been shown to be safe and effective. And the vaccine is being developed by American firm Pfizer and the German company BioNTech, or BioNTech. It has been tested on 43,500 people in six countries. Now of that study, of all the people who've been given either the vaccine or the placebo, 92 people on that study have caught COVID and the comparison between the groups who got the real vaccine and those who didn't shows that the vaccine itself reduces the chance of catching the virus by 90 percent. Very significant. Someone who knows more about vaccines than me, Jonathan Van Tam, the deputy chief medical officer, sounded incredibly positive about the developments in today's government press conference. This is really a very important scientific breakthrough. I'm certain of that. I want to first of all begin to thank people around the world, including here in the UK, who have been clinical trials volunteers. We would not be talking to you about the news today if there weren't volunteers who go into clinical trials to help us find cures and vaccines against this awful disease. And thank you also to the hundreds of thousands of unsung scientists in the vaccine industry who've worked around the clock and are still working around the clock trying to find yet further vaccines for the world. This is truly appreciated. So today's news is the first vaccine and the first step. And it is very exciting. It is very exciting. Let's let's let's let's celebrate some good news for once. So John Bell, Regis professor of medicine at Oxford University went even further than Jonathan Van Tam. He is also a member of the government's vaccine task force. Here he is speaking to Sarah Montague on the world at one on radio for this afternoon. Do we now say with confidence that life should be returning to normal by spring? Yes. Yes. Yes. I'm probably the first guy to say that, but I do. I will say that with some confidence. That's fabulous news. Professor John Bell, thank you so much for talking to us. Very, very lovely video there. So the medium term, this seems like good news. I haven't really seen many people at all saying, oh, this is actually just hot air. It's probably not going to happen. The consensus seems to be that this is very good news and we should have a vaccine, you know, within a few months. There was a word of warning though from Jonathan Van Tam that this does not mean the crisis is over. This is also from today's government press conference. So what do we know about the vaccine? Well, we know this particular vaccine prevents disease. That's clear from the effectiveness readout that we've had today. What we don't know yet, and where you have to be patient and stick with us, is that we don't know what this means yet for when we can get life back to normal, when we can start to lift some of the restrictions that we live under. Frankly, we're in the middle of the second wave and I don't see the vaccine making any difference for the wave we are now in. I'm hopeful that it may prevent future waves, but this one we have to battle through to the end without vaccine. That all makes sense. The vaccine will be around either, it looks like we might have people getting their first doses around Christmas, but it's not going to be a solution to coronavirus until the spring, which means that all of the potential deaths which are going to come in this second wave, it didn't take long, of course, for tens of thousands of people to die in spring and we've got the same amount of time in between now and when a vaccine can be rolled out properly for us all to work through. So we will see a lot of pain, a lot of trauma in between now and that point at which the vaccine comes online. But Ash, this is undeniably good news, right? I mean this second lockdown is going to be much more tolerable knowing that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Yeah, no. I mean this is unequivocally good news. And I think one of the things that's really wonderful about the news of a vaccine on the horizon is that it means that so far when we've talked about going back to normal, there's been a kind of implicit exclusion of people who've got clinical vulnerabilities or are elderly, right? So within that there's been a kind of invisible hierarchy of who has the right to a public life anymore and who doesn't. And I think that's been one of the really pernicious things around just shield as being proposed as a solution to managing coronavirus and the risk posed to different kinds of people. So yeah, the idea that you can restore some kind of social contact public life of people who've had to really lead half a life since March, I just think is so encouraging. There's also, and I'm not going to lie, there's this huge bit of me which has been so wounded by promises being made and not fulfilled by this government in particular. Boris Johnson at the beginning of the crisis predicting it was all going to be over within three months. You've got Operation Moonshot which is a complete shambles, the various promises being made in terms of the availability of antibody testing that I maintain a little bit of expect the worst hope for the best. Just because I think if I put all my eggs in the basket of, you know, I'm going to be in the club by spring, I might not be as resilient if that doesn't happen. Yeah, absolutely. And also, I mean, it's very important to say that because a vaccine is around the corner doesn't mean now is the time to relax. In fact, it means kind of the opposite. It means that now is precisely when we can tolerate really some strict measures for a short period of time because we know there's something on the other side. What many people are arguing when they sort of said we shouldn't have a lockdown is that if we have to learn to live with this virus forever, then we can't keep locking down. But if it seems like a vaccine is around in four months and to save tens of thousands of lives, it probably is worth us being in lockdown for most of the winter. Obviously not pleasant, but if we've got a vaccine in spring and that can save thousands of lives, it does seem like a sensible option. Can I add to that one thing? Because the danger of going, oh, there's a vaccine on the horizon in four months time is that it almost justifies Boris Johnson and his government's strategy of just kicking the can down the road, not really prioritising too much of any one thing. Whereas I think in some ways it's wisest for the government to behave as though there isn't a vaccine around the corner. And in order to emerge from this lockdown that we're currently in, we're going to have to look more towards the East Asian model of pandemic management. We've got really rigorous border testing. You've got lockdowns which are actually lockdowns you quarantine people outside of the home. And then it means you can approach your kind of normalcy in which clinically vulnerable and elderly people can also participate because you've suppressed the virus to that extent. And that should be the goal that we push the government towards. I do wonder about this news. It's almost letting them off the hook a little bit in terms of everything they fucked up so far. So that's my little other word of warning. Just because a story has a happy ending doesn't mean we have to forgive everyone who fucked up along the way. Let's go to the issue of distribution. Because obviously it seems like we're going to have an effective vaccine, but how quickly can it be rolled out? That's the question on everyone's lips. And we can go to the BBC with four N explanation as this was in there right up at the story. They write a limited number of people may get the vaccine this year. Pfizer and BioNTech say they will have enough safety data by the third week of November to take their vaccine to regulators. Until it has been approved, it will not be possible for countries to begin their vaccination campaigns. The two companies say they will be able to supply 50 million doses by the end of this year and around 1.3 billion by the end of 2021. Each person needs two doses. The UK should get 10 million doses by the end of the year with a further 30 million doses already ordered. The vaccine looks like it's going to come online quite quickly. They're saying 1.3 billion by the end of 2021. If you have to, if everyone has to take two doses of this vaccine before they have immunity, that's going to be about 600 million people, isn't it? So I mean, the demand from the left has to be that we have to be distributing this equitably, not just to the countries that have the highest incomes, but to the countries which are in the most need. My guess would be that in countries like the UK at least, I would hope that this is probably going to be distributed within our country somewhat equitably. It seems like from what the government is saying, this is going to go to the people who are most vulnerable first. So people in older age groups, people with health conditions, which make them more vulnerable to COVID-19 and healthcare workers. I'm not sure if they'll have such a sort of rational approach in those countries without an NHS. But probably the bigger issue really here is that what countries are able to buy up these vaccines? Is it just going to be that countries in South America, countries with lower income and less sort of intimate relationships with the kind of companies who are coming up with these vaccines, they are going to have to tolerate the sort of hellishness of living with COVID-19 for a few years to come. That's going to be the political battle ahead. The other problem is we don't really know how long immunity lasts. So it could be the case that whilst this is shown to be effective in the short term, if it wears off in six months, we're going to have the problem of having to revaccinate everyone over and over again every year. I mean, again, that wouldn't be the end of the world. We do that with the flu vaccine. We vaccinate people once a year. If we did that with coronavirus, you know, it's still good news. And in terms of distribution, so I just told you the sort of 1.2 billion or 1.3 billion that Pfizer says they can distribute, even more positive than that, it does seem like the fact that Pfizer have come up with a successful vaccine means that many of the other vaccines which are currently in production or in the experimental phases are more likely to pull through. If one works, we can expect others will too. And we're going to go back to Jonathan Van Tam, who explains why that's the case with some quite colorful analogies. So the current vaccine that's being announced, its results are announced today, targets the S protein of the coronavirus. And so far, all we knew was that vaccines could give us antibodies against the S protein. We did not know if vaccines would prevent disease. And so this is a huge milestone. But more importantly, it is good news for many other vaccines to come, because almost all of the vaccines coming also target the S protein. So this is like, you know, getting to the end of a playoff final, it's gone to penalties. The first player goes up, scores the goal. You haven't won the cup yet. But what it does is it tells you that the goalkeeper can be beaten. And that's where we are today, that first sign. That was Jonathan Van Tam there. Ash, I want to go to you because I know you watch more football than me. Does that make sense? If the first football player scores the penalty, then that makes it more likely that the others will. I thought, you know, isn't the goalkeeper nearly always kind of beatable? Did that analogy make sense to you? Okay. I mean, the thing is, is that the mechanics of the analogy don't line up, because obviously coronavirus isn't sentient. And why after the first goal goes in, you're more likely to beat the keeper is because their head's gone. Confidence is gone. Okay, I see. The kind of self-delusion and belief of I will stop every goal that comes up, that's gone. But in terms of statistics, he's right. So that's why the analogy is correct. But in terms of mechanics of the thing, it's a little shonky, shall we say. But there's one thing that I wanted to say, and it was about the distribution of the vaccine, because of course, older and people with clinical vulnerabilities are those the people who are being prioritized. But one thing I would like to see is that as it's distributed through the working age population, is that it's prioritized in such a way that reflects the way different kinds of people have been exposed to different kinds of risk because of their living situations and because of how they have to work. Because we all know that Black and Asian minority ethnic people in this country have been disproportionately impacted by coronavirus, even when you adjust for age. And there are two reasons why that is. One is socioeconomic factors, the way in which poverty is linked to particular health care outcomes and particular housing conditions. And then the other is what kind of work are you in? How public facing is your role? How much contact do you have with other people? And how protected are you by your employers even? So what I would like to see is rather than it being rolled out with like Bangladesh's first, first of the queue, is that actually you've got people who are in those key roles as security guards and shelf stackers and cleaners and porters, is that in the working age population they get protected first, not the people who've been able to work from home all this time, the people who've been exposed to the virus all this time and that's been reflected in the death rates.