which killed at least 135 people, injured 5,000 more and made a huge number of others homeless. a search is continuing for over 100 missing people. a number of officials at the port where the explosion occurred are to be kept under house arrest while investigations continue. lebanese officials have said that the storage of some 2,700 tonnes of ammonium nitrate at a warehouse in the port caused the blast. and thursday injapan marks 75 years since the us dropped an atomic bomb on the city of hiroshima, killing thousands, and changing the nature of warfare. three days later, another bomb was dropped on the city of nagasaki. between 150,000-220,000 people were killed. that is it for me, mike will be

here at the top of the hour. now on bbc news, hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk, i'm stephen sackur. amid all the talk of spikes and second waves, one thing is clear. those people predicting an early end to the covid—19 pandemic are indulging in wishful thinking. so, is there any way of respecting the science and mitigating the worst impacts on economic and social life? my guest today is sir jeremy farrar, director of the wellcome trust and a key scientific adviser to the uk government. just how dangerous is the moment we're in now?

sirjeremy farrar, welcome to hardtalk. pleasure. governments around the world have had pretty much six months now to figure out how to get control of covid—19. how do you think they're doing? i think we face enormous challenges. we've got a virus which came across from animals into humans maybe sometime in 2019, maybe before that. to which none of us have any immunity, we have no treatments, no vaccines, no diagnostic when it happened, and it's very, very transmissible. it goes from me to you very easily and so spreads around the world in, what, 100 days and it was essentially in every country. so, i think we face an enormous challenge. in fact, i don't believe the world has really come to understand the threat that we continue to face. i mean, isn't that the problem? because i mentioned the six months because it is pretty much six months since it became clear that the transmission was moving beyond borders, beyond china, to the rest

of the world. and frankly for the last few months, governments have purported to take the actions necessary to put a lid on this but it is not working if one looks at latin america, north america, the resurgence of cases in parts of the world that thought they had it under control. it's just not working. yeah, and that's. .. whatever you've tried, and there have been different countries trying different things. china did something different to korea did something different to japan, did something different to north america and europe as you rightly say. but we come back to the fundamentals of the virus. this virus is so infectious, it causes people to have almost no symptoms but be able to be passing onto another person all the way through to very severe and, tragically, a very large number of people have lost lives. so, we come back to the fundamentals of this infection and the way the world works now in it's interconnectivity, its multi—generational families, its inequalities that have been the causes of the spread of this.

and we don't have those interventions, whether they be vaccines or drugs or indeed quick diagnostics, that would really make the difference and take us as the only exit strategy out of this pandemic. you are an infectious diseases expert. you've tried and, indeed in many ways, succeeded in different efforts to combat dangerous viruses and disease going back to aids—hiv, bird flu, sars — you've been involved in all of them. when you look at covid—19, are you now thinking we are already beyond the first wave, that we're into something that is a repeat wave? or is this to you wherever we talk about in the world, still part of the story of the origins of covid—19? yeah, this is still in the origins. i think there is a lot of words said, "second waves," "rebounds", "resurgences," i mean this has never gone away. even in countries that managed to suppress it — korea, germany, singapore — even those countries are seeing resurgences.

what we're seeing is this infection reverberating around the world. and that will continue because the restrictions in place, the physical distancing, the closing down of economies, none of those change the fundamentals of the infection or this virus. so, as soon as we lift them, as happened in europe injune, as happened in america injune and july, we can see a resurgence coming back. until we change the fundamentals of the virus, we won't to get out of this pandemic. it'll continue to reverberate around the world. why are some governments more successful than others? you're one of the scientific adviser to the british government, you sit on the sage committee that advises the government on emergency response, in this case covid—19. and the british government sits on a case study which looks pretty poor, the highest excess death rate in europe over the past six months. why? why the failure here? well, i think there's been a lot of failures throughout. i think you've got to really explore the period

building up to 2020. you can't just look at this year and say, "why did we fail now?" because a lot of the causes of the challenges countries have faced, and indeed the failures, are because of what happened in the last 20 years. the last 20 years since 1998—99 with the coming of a virus called nipah in malaysia which few people have heard of now but is now endemic in bangladesh, that was really the start of where we started to see these animal viruses coming into humans and being able to go between one person and another. as we've changed the ecology, as we've changed the environment, as we've changed how we lived — we live in bigger cities now, and they are all connected. and in that 20 years, we've also neglected the investment in public health. we've outsourced the developing of vaccines and drugs purely to the pharmaceutical industry without determining what they should make for us in terms of public health. so, i think you have to look at the last ten or 20

years in the preparation that was done prior to this outbreak because when you have an outbreak, you cannotjust turn things on when you need them. they come because of the investments you make before the outbreak. were the british... was the british government too late in ordering a lockdown? we saw many other countries in europe do it much quicker. and again, you were there, you were on the sage committee advising the government. did you and they, the politicians, get it wrong? yeah, i do believe that those restrictions, lockdowns... i don't like the term "lockdowns". it seems like punishment and it seems sort of wrong use of words to me. but that lockdown i believe, yes, in the uk came too late. there's no doubt in my view that lockdowns have suppressed the virus, the physical distancing, the handwashing, everything that goes with those lockdowns has reduced transmission where they've been imposed. and the timing that you made those lockdowns was critical to the impact you had

and i think for the uk, particularly for london and england, that lockdown came too late. in fact, it may have come at around the right time for scotland who had less community transmission in the middle of march than was true in england. but i think that's got to be one of the lessons that we learn. but one of the key questions as we look back at what happened and try to make sense of how we're going to improve the situation in going forward is, whether the government, the politicians followed and followed urgently and quickly the advice of the scientists. so, on this question of when to lock down and quite how far to go in doing it, did in yourview the politicians react in the right way to the advice of the science? yeah, the science was clear in the week of the 16th of march that community transmission in the uk was further ahead than anybody thought. the exact data wasn't available but what you could see in italy, what you could see in france, and what you could see in spain told us that the uk was on a very fast upward trajectory in that epidemic.

and i think that week in the 16th of march through until when the lockdown was actually imposed on the 23rd was a week lost in terms of that lockdown. and thousands of lives lost as a result. and as a result, further transmission, further infections, and as a consequence tragically, people died. does it stick in your throat when the prime minister boasts about the performance of the british government? i think we've all made mistakes. we've all made mistakes. i look back again at the period from january to february. it was very clear injanuary that there was an animal infection in humans in a major cityjust prior to chinese new year which caused asymptomatic infections. it was very clear injanuary that human—to—human transmission was part of the infectious nature of this virus. and it was clearly spreading in china, and indeed to the region and i think that period again, january and february, is when whether complacency or thinking that this was going to be another case of the boy that

cried wolf, that this was when again, those two months i think are absolutely critical. i want to pick away at two key issues, trust — that is trust of the public in the messages they're getting from the government and the scientists — and also clarity. clarity of message about what we the public should do. let's start with trust. how do you think the politicians particularly in the united kingdom have scored when it comes to building and keeping the trust of the public? trust is critical to public health. i mean, without trust, you don't have public health. public health demands that the community that we all trust the message and we know as much as possible what that message is. in march — sorry to interrupt. in march of this year, trust at the very beginning of the crisis amongst the british public in their government was measured at 72% in an average of polls.

in latejune, that is just what three months later, it had plummeted to 44%. yeah. what does that tell us? it tells us that trust was lost. i mean, those figures are very clear. that's a public health disaster. it is. trust lies at the heart of public health and if you lose trust in, yes, the science or in the politicians or in the messages of that science, then the public doesn't know what to believe, what to trust and there's a cacophony of stories of whatever goes on. there has to be somewhere as a sort of guiding light of what that is. and the actions of people needs to be consistent with that trust. have we reached the limit, do you believe, of the easing of the restrictions on so—called normal life? because the chief medical 0fficer chris whitty indicated just the other day that he thinks frankly there is no more wiggle room and that if we ease up in certain new ways,

for example encouraging more and more people to go back to work, encouraging children, all of them, to go back to school in september, we may well have to impose new tougher conditions on socialising, for example. we may have to consider closing the pubs thatjust reopened. ie, they're going to be trade—offs in the future. absolutely at the limit orfrankly a little bit beyond the limit now. we can see today, beginning of august, we can see in belgium. we can see in france, we can see in germany that numbers are rising again. we can see and learn lessons from what's happened in the united states

where restrictions were lifted early with higher rates of transmission and there's been a resurgence of the infection. this r value which tells you how many people you would infect if i were infected today is at one or very close to one or indeed just above one. the number of infections in the country over the last month have increased. so, generally, around the world you think we relaxed too early? i think we, yes, we relaxed too early and we will see a resurgence. but you also have to ask the flip question there which is how long can you keep restrictions in place? there is no doubt in my mind that children in particular have suffered enormously during this pandemic. the fact that schools have had to close will damage children's education, particularly the most vulnerable children who where school is often the only safe environment they have during their day and their week, children whose native language is not that of the country they live in. children, in my view, need to be the priority of reopening the economy — and in fact by opening schools again, you could open other parts of the economy because so many parents depend on their children being in school. there are some scientists and some economists who actually believe despite the evidence as you've described of rising infection rates in many parts of the world in the last few weeks, they still say that

we've got the balance wrong between caution which they say is the right feeling to have and fear which they say has been too dominant and is deeply damaging to the fabric of society to the economy, to social lives, to the general well—being of the population. what do you think about the balance currently struck between caution and outright fear? it's an incredibly difficult balance to strike. and, of course, it depends very much on your own experience and what you see in your family and your friends and your contact groups and everything else. i think that without putting those restrictions in place and keeping them in place, we would have had a much worse pandemic even then we have suffered so far. and at the moment, there is no exit from this. we can't, as we know, lift these restrictions further than they are now without seeing a resurgence. and the idea that this is only

seriously affecting a small group of the population, i think, is wrong. we've seen both young people getting sick and being in hospital and dying. we've seen people from certain parts of the population, particularly those from bame populations in this country and around the world who have suffered disproportionately, the impact of course on children's education. so i think we mustn't underestimate this pandemic, and i think the balance is, i would err on the side of caution because i think the ramifications of not are just too severe. what do you make of raj bhopal, the professor of public health at edinburgh university, arguing that it is time for "some serious demographic differentiation"? you have just said we know that young people can get infected, yes we do. on occasion, but we also know that the massive preponderance of people who are seriously affected by covid—19 are the elderly, the over—65 or 70s. now, as a result of that, professor bhopal says,

"we need to talk about this concept of population immunity." he says, "if about a0—50% of the population had some level of immunity against this virus, we would actually over time clear it from the population. how to achieve that?" well, he says, "this is a very rare cause of death in the under—25s — especially women and girls. so, in my view, we should be now allowing young people to get on with their lives, their careers, their social lives while we make a special effort to look after the older people." do you agree? i don't because i think it's extraordinarily difficult from a practical point of view let alone other perspectives to isolate a community because of an age issue, and actually in the end, i don't believe practically... but already the government flew a kite here in the uk suggesting that they might ask the over 50s to take special measures, in essence to self—isolate in a way that younger elements of the population wouldn't be required to do.

i don't know where that's come from. i've not been involved in any of those discussions. but there's other things. if the young population, transmission is going on in that young population, firstly we don't yet know. this is an infection and a disease we've only known about for six months. we don't know that the long—term consequences of this infection in those with mild disease. there is a number of reports of strokes occurring after a relatively mild disease some weeks or months later, damage to the heart in people that had relatively mild disease. i think we are only, at the moment, learning the acute illnesses. we don't yet know the chronic illnesses, and they will come out in the coming weeks and months. younger populations also don'tjust of course mix with younger populations. there are either intergenerational families where you run the risk of a young population giving, passing that infection on to their elderly relatives. and of course those young people then work in hospitals, in care homes, in other environments where they could be passing that

infection on to others. so, both from a practical point of view and actually i think from a moral point of view, i think it becomes extraordinarily difficult to say, "you are going to be isolated because of a feature of your self, your age, your ethnicity, whatever else it is, and the rest of the population can get on with their life." i think that would be extraordinarily difficult to achieve let alone the right thing. i just want to come back to the british government and the relationship between science and policymakers, politicians. you have looked at this over many years in different cases of infectious disease and how politicians handle it. do you think there is a problem in the uk in the relationship between the scientists and the politicians? there will be lessons learnt from this as there were lessons learnt although not always taken heed of with previous epidemics, whether bse or others. i think it's absolutely critical — and i'm not in government. i think it's absolutely critical that scientists are able to give independent advice even if that independent advice is difficult to accept

and it's then ultimately the decision of course of politicians to make the decisions. and in the spirit of transparency, should there be a full open public inquiry as to what went wrong in the uk? absolutely. i mean, there has to be. public inquiry? there has to be... i'm not sure of the details of public inquiry versus other inquiries. there should be an open, transparent, available—to—the—public the public inquiry about the way the uk prepared for and responded to this pandemic. because we will face more like this. the world we live in today with the changing ecology, urbanisation, and connectivity means this will not be the last very unpleasant, horrible pandemic we face. so, if we don't learn lessons from this one, we will make similar mistakes in the future. so, there has to be a completely open inquiry after the end of this. i want to end by talking about the vaccine because several times in this conversation, you have said there is no end in sight to this and it's

inconceivable that frankly there will be until there is a very effective vaccine which gets to the 7 billion plus people who in the end will presumably need it if we are to eradicate covid—19. you follow very closely what's happening with the vaccine. how much hope do you invest in getting a vaccine that can be delivered realistically right around the world say within the next year? yeah, i am cautiously optimistic. there's been amazing progress in vaccinology going back over the last ten years but in the last seven months since i've been involved, the progress is absolutely staggering and there are now first generations of the vaccines, there is probably five or six of them from the us, from europe, from china, from russia that are becoming available. do i think those first—generation vaccines will be the answer to everything? no. and we mustn't only depend on the vaccines. as i came through my own

professional career, i started in the hiv world in the mid—1980s. here we are in 2020, we don't have an hiv vaccine. so, it's not just about vaccines. it's about diagnostics, about treatment, it's indeed about social science and behavioural change, and yes, i do believe there will be a vaccine in 2020 and 2021. you do? i do. but of course part of the problem at the moment is that there isn't in a sense the sort of international collaboration one would like to see to believe that a vaccine, even if proven scientifically to be effective, will be shared right around the world. and we've also seen the united states, for example, just withdraw from the world health organization. there's talk of vaccine nationalism and a very nationalistic approach to the entire covid pandemic. you as an expert in global health, how worried are you by that? in global health, how very worried. in global health, how i think best put actually by the prime minister of singapore who called for vaccine multilateralism because the truth is, the vaccine to be effective to protect the population of the uk or any other country

will depend notjust on a vaccine being used in the uk, but it will be dependent on a vaccine being used all around the world. so, it's in our enlightened self—interest that that vaccine is not just available here but is available globally. do you think governments around the world really get that? i think they are getting it now, and we are in a very, very difficult geopolitical world. we have these huge us—china tensions, of course russia announcing this week they also have a vaccine. i do think the uk is in a remarkably strong position when it comes to the vaccines, the uk vaccine task force has done a fantasticjob. the uk could now provide this global leadership to say, "we have vaccines, we have more than we need, and we will make both our vaccines available to everybody and we will invest in sepi, in gavi, in the civics facility, we will work with the who, and we will work with all partners to make this vaccine available globally." a final thought which is actually not about our

governments but is about all of us, us people, and a degree to which there is a mounting scepticism evidenced in the united states, to a certain extent in the uk and other countries as well, from members of the public who no longer trust the government, the scientists enough to believe that a vaccine will necessarily be safe. to quote anthony fauci, the scientific adviser in the us, he says, "there is now a general anti—science, anti—authority, anti—vaccine feeling abroad in this country. an alarming percentage of people have deep scepticism about this vaccine." polls suggesting maybe 50% of the public might not take it. that is going to kill our effort to eliminate covid—19! if it gets worse, it will kill it. if 50% of the population are not willing to have the vaccine and we have one, and it is safe and effective, that would be a disaster, you are absolutely right. it's not just here. the vaccine hesitancy, the anti—vaccine movement

is also rife and present in africa, in asia, in latin america. we have to counter that. we have to firstly make sure that a vaccine is safe and that's critical. although it is being rushed through, we must make sure it is safe because we will be giving a vaccine, as you said, to billions of people. we must rebuild trust yes in governments but also in scientists to make the case for that vaccine. and i think we have to also notjust engage but involve in the vaccine, in its development. so many people in so many parts of the world now don't see measles on a regular basis, they don't see tetanus, diphtheria, all the vaccine preventable diseases that even my parents‘ generation would've seen regularly. we have to make the case of the importance of vaccines, how safe they are, and how they are going to be actually in the end the only exit strategy from the covid—19 pandemic. jeremy farrar, it's been a pleasure having you on hardtalk, thank you very much.

thank you. hello. while some parts of the uk have had some pleasant sunshine occasionally this week and stayed dry so far, albeit rather windy, others have been very wet — particularly into parts of scotland but notjust scotland. 0ther spots had some heavy downpours during wednesday. but it is looking, for thursday, drier and warmer. high pressure building a little further. coming around to a southerly and that is going to lift temperatures again particularly into england and wales on friday. there will be another surge

of heat with temperatures in the 30s for some as we will see in a moment. temperatures as we start thursday will have held up overnight across a large part of england and wales. so, a rather muggy start. could be a few mist and fog patches around. a zone of thicker cloud into parts of southern england, could be a bit drizzly with that pushing into parts of wales and the midlands during the day. could stay misty along some spots along the english channel coast. whereas elsewhere across the uk, it's a mix of cloud, some occasional sunny skies. it will be dry. best of the sunny skies in scotland towards the north. it is warmer, and temperatures peak in the upper 20s in the warmest parts of the east and southeast of england, just a gentle southerly breeze. 0n through thursday night, into friday morning, keep a bit of cloud, clear, keep some clear spells too — in fact clearing up across more of england and wales going into friday morning. and what will be another rather warm and muggy night. a warmer night in scotland and northern ireland. though by friday morning there's a weather front close to northern ireland and for here and then

eastwards across scotland, there will be some showery rain moving in. a few late showers and thunderstorms can't be ruled out in england and wales but the main story here will be the sunshine and the heat again. upper 20s, low 30s, and hottest parts of the east and southeast of england, mid—30s, 35, maybe 36 celsius around the london area. temperatures nowhere near that high in scotland and northern ireland — it'll be heavily cloudy with the chance of rain during the day. high pressure building back in for the weekend and that does mean a lot of dry weather particularly on saturday. by sunday there is an increasing chance of some thunderstorms around, particularly into parts of england and wales. and where friday is going to be so very hot, it will slowly cool a touch into the weekend but more noticeably elsewhere.

this is bbc news with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. my name's mike embley. there is mounting anger in lebanon against politicians who did not prevent yesterday's blast. at least 135 people have died, thousands are injured. the shockwave, was so powerful it knocked people off their feet, blowing out windows for miles around. millions turn out to vote in sri lanka's elections — despite coronavirus fears. and japan marks 75 years since the us atomic bomb was dropped on hiroshima. we look at the lingering impact of the attack, and hearfrom the last survivors.