hello, this is bbc news. the headlines: act like you have the virus. that's the advice in a new campaign in the uk urging people to abide by lockdown rules. a boeing 737, believed to be carrying more than 50 people, has gone missing after take—off in indonesia. donald trump is banned permanently from twitter because of concerns his tweets could incite more violence. democrats reveal the draft of a new impeachment resolution against donald trump — the president elect accuses him of inciting an insurrection and endangering the security of the us. and snow in spain leaves hundreds of drivers trapped in their cars, as roads are blocked and madrid airport remains closed.

now on bbc news, hardtalk with professor neil ferguson. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. covid—19 is a global pandemic but its impacts have varied markedly. while countries like vietnam and south korea have effectively controlled the virus, others have been much less successful. britain is back in nationwide lockdown as infection rates surge and the death toll approaches 80,000. the hope is that the roll—out of vaccines will vanquish the virus but for now, the terrible cost of covid continues to rise. my guest is neil ferguson, an epidemiologist who has advised the uk government. did britain get covid wrong?

professor neil ferguson, welcome to hardtalk. thank you for having me. how bleak would you say is britain's covid situation right now? i think it's probably second only to the situation we were in on 22nd of march before lockdown in terms of really the prospects going forward. and in some ways, bleaker still. the new variant of the virus everybody will have heard about transmits considerably more effectively than our previous variance, probably 50—70% more transmissible, and that means

control measures which have worked in the past to contain the spread may not work in the future. the one silver lining, of course, is that we are rolling out vaccines now in the uk and the faster we can do that, the faster we can protect people and reduce the toll of the disease we're seeing currently. would it be fair to say that the scientists did see this coming. i mean, you refer to the new variant of covid—19 which clearly has affected the uk arguably more than any other country in the world, may have originated here — it seems it did. but the scientists were warning as early as the summer that the winter was going to be extremely difficult for the united kingdom. so, this really isn't a surprise, is it? i would go back even further. we always anticipated even back in february and march of the initial analysis of how this virus spread and how transmissible it was that whilst lockdown measures and social distancing measures could be effective as we've seen in italy

and china, they only work for as long as they're in force. and so if you relax those measures and relax them, there comes a critical point where transmissions starts resurging and that's exactly what we saw really across europe in the autumn. very fair point, not limited to the uk by any means. 0ne looks at the per capita figures for deaths by covid in countries like italy and belgium, we are not alone, but in absolute number terms we are the worst or perhaps by some measures the second worst in all of europe. and i come back to this point — and you've already raised it. would you say the politicians, the managers of the response policy on covid—i9, have got it wrong? i think a lot of what we see in terms of the death totals is really down to how quickly countries responded. undoubtedly, countries like the uk but also spain, italy, and france had much more infection spreading in those countries

in february and march than our surveillance systems picked up because we didn't switch on surveillance soon enough, and that explains that first wave death toll. unfortunately, the same mistakes were made again in multiple countries in the autumn as well. i mean, the consensus around social distancing was breaking down clearly politically. there are many people who are very well aware of the economic and social costs of it, and so talking to scientists, my friends and colleagues across europe, they were all in the same position of advising government one thing but government feeling unable to act until they really saw evidence of hospitalisations and death rising. and of course by the time you see that, it's almost too late. what is the real, if i may, what is the real problem here? you are a scientist who for some time sat on the sage advisory panel advisory advising the government

on covid response, you still sit on the nervtag committee which looks at the response to covid. so, you know the relationship between politicians and scientists are well. how can it be that the prime minister of great britain boris johnson just three days ago assured the nation that schools would stay open because, in his words, "there is no doubt they are safe," and then just a day later declares that all schools as part of a new national lockdown are going to be closed till mid—february? i'm afraid i don't have detailed insight into the thinking at number 10 or cabinet office. i think there's a general issue that... i mean, often particularly epidemiologists like myself, other people on sage, we try to give the best foresight we can analysing data and often, there is a lot of uncertainty initially. and it's only when, i think, sometimes when politicians see the actual trends —

you know, hospitals filling up, ever—increasing case numbers — that they feel they have in some sense the political capital to act unfortunately. and again, this is not a criticism of the uk government at the moment. it's equally been an issue in many countries and of course in some countries despite rising case numbers, politicians have felt unable to act regardless... but isn't there something about learning lessons as we go along? i mean, back in march, you acquired this tag in some of the tabloid press in the united kingdom of being "professor lockdown" because you were urging a lockdown at a time the government didn't want one and you said, "look, "if we don't take action, up to half a million "people could die." and you then said in evidence to a parliamentary committee in the summer that because the government delayed by, in your view at least a week, in your calculation, that cost many thousands of lives. so, i'm asking you — in your view, has the government not

learned that its reluctance to act on scientific advice does cost lives? i think that message has got through and if we just focus on the new variant, that came out of the blue, i think the government did act and respond really quite rapidly to that... hang on. with respect, professor ferguson, i've looked back at the record. on december 8th, there was a key meeting of the expert scientists and public health officials about what they were seeing in the south east of england... yes, i was part of it, yes. you know, you were there. throughout that month of december, the government insisted that schools, and let's highlight this issue of schools because it's very important, schools must stay open. on december 22nd, the sage committee of scientific advisers said that there was no way the infection rate, the r number, could be kept below one if schools were kept open. december 22nd!

and yet in earlyjanuary, we still had the prime minister insisting that schools would stay open. what's gone wrong in the relationship, the communication between you, the scientists, and the leaders of government? well, first of all, i don't think i and other scientists directly communicate with government. that goes clearly through people like patrick vallance, chief scientific adviser chris whitty. i think that the move yesterday to lockdown the country was very much stimulated by all the chief medical officers moving the country as a whole, the uk, to what's called alert level 5. look, i'm not an apologist for the uk government. what i try to do is give the best scientific advice i can based on analysis of data in real—time. it is inevitable that when anything new happens and something changes in the characteristic of the virus or the epidemic overall, data is initially noisy, there's not that much of it,

and when it comes to very significant decisions being made which affect a lot of people's lives, some people want more evidence than you initially have at the very first time. it's not an excuse but it's understandable. i suppose the counterargument would be the economic and educational and social and emotional costs of going into a lockdown for a third time, particularly a lockdown with the schools closed, will be very considerable. i don't think anybody, professor ferguson, would underestimate how difficult these decisions are. they're extraordinarily difficult. but you're a data analyst apart from anything else and i said that in the summer, you calculated that the government's delay in imposing the first lockdown had cost thousands of lives — you said, actually, at the time that the number of deaths could have been halved had the government acted more speedily. can you put a number on the number of deaths you think have been caused by successive reluctance of government to impose

a second and third lockdown, the decision on schools which saw all primary pupils, or pretty much all of them, go back to school for one day at the beginning ofjanuary? it's not something i spent a lot of time thinking about. undoubtedly, i would say delays here is difficult to assess the impact in schools only reopen for a day and most of the heavily affected areas were in near lockdown anyhow being in tier 4. i would actually point out that there was a cost to delaying the lockdown in england to november instead of acting earlier in the autumn when it was clear case numbers were rising. and whilst all european countries have had a very difficult autumn, difficult winter — and we've been particularly badly affected by this new variant which is spreading everywhere but much more advanced here. nevertheless, if you just look at multiple other countries such as germany, such as most of the scandinavian countries, they clearly have kept per capita mortality and hospital

demand at a fraction of what we've seen throughout the whole epidemic. and that's the benefit of acting earlier, really. you have over a period as we've discussed told the government it needs to act quicker on lockdowns but isn't the truth that if one looks at the countries which have done best if i can put it that way through the covid crisis, and i'm thinking of many countries in asia — for example, south korea, taiwan, vietnam, one could argue china as well and certainly australasia, new zealand and australia — these countries haven't really relied on lockdowns at all. what they have relied upon is systematic, extremely efficient track, trace, isolate systems. they've also really controlled their borders and who is coming into their country and ensuring that every person who comes in is tested upon arrival. they have also delivered clear and consistent public health policy messaging.

where's britain's standing on all of those measures? yes, i mean, epidemiologically the situation was very different. i completely agree. i mean not all southeast asian countries but the countries you mention have achieved control because they never let infection numbers in their country get to high levels, and that's the critical point. if you only ever have small numbers of infections, you can invest an enormous amount of resource in tracking them down, tracking contacts and basically almost eliminate the virus within your borders and that's what many of those countries have done. but we could — i mean, i say "we". britain, other western nations, the united states — could have focused on that, couldn't they? but for some reason didn't. i mean, and that's where the, i think, the biggest error came about. there was too much. in order to really control it in that same way for the uk, for the us given the travel volumes we have, we would have probably had

to act to restrict travel dramatically more than we did all the way back injanuary. but beyond that, there was a mistake made really across europe with perhaps the exception of germany in not ramping up surveillance within our countries at an earlier stage. so, there was a lot of focus injanuary and february on testing travellers in a few countries to see if they had covid if they reported symptoms. we missed most of the people coming in from other european countries with infection, and we let infection get established in our country invisibly without noticing. and by the time we got to that stage, i mean track and trace, we've never got infection levels low enough for the vietnamese, even the korean—style model to be highly effective. there's been too many cases. hang on, china's part of this argument. i mean, they clearly

did have the big arguably the origin problem of this virus in wuhan and they faced many thousands of cases in december... but a tiny, tiny number — i mean, we have more cases now happening per day. we had more cases happening per day frankly in end of september than china reported in their entire epidemic... yeah, we don't know if those numbers are reliable but my point is that you have looked at china and rather controversially said, "you know what? "china is a communist one—party state and we scientists originally "said we couldn't get away with what they were doing in europe. "but then, we realised we could." now, some libertarian—minded politicians in the uk worry about statements like that. you appear to be saying that the chinese approach, a deeply intrusive surveillance across all sectors of society, all kinds of public movement, is the sort of thing that you see in the future for the united kingdom and western democracies. is that right? i'm not saying that at all, i should say. back in february and march,

we weren't even sure it was controllable. i mean, china led the way in locking down. the surveillance, the contact tracing, everything else followed but the impact of the lockdown in wuhan on driving case numbers down was what really then informed the italian response which was the first western country to implement similar measures. and it was also effective there, and that's what really informed the rest of the world. yes, i mean, china and many other countries have implemented measures which we might not tolerate in terms of that balance between public health and freedom... liberty, yeah. liberty. but that's a slightly separate issue from the effectiveness of social distancing measures which is what i was talking about. let's move to the vaccine because obviously as an epidemiologist, you want to see this disease conquered. and it seems right now the best hope we've got is the rapid roll—out in 2021 of various vaccines

which are now in the works across the world. in your view, what percentage of the population has to be vaccinated, immunised, before the kinds of restrictions we still see in many western nations can be significantly eased? so, it's not an all or nothing thing, it's a continuum. i mean, people talk about... there's a lot of debate in america at the moment about the herd immunity threshold. what proportion need to be vaccinated to completely go back to normal? i'm not sure if we can really estimate that reliably particularly with a new variant, but it is probably in excess of 80% of the population. i think the more relevant issue... i'm sorry, hang on, just to stop you there. if it's around 80% of the population, it's going to be many months before that's achievable in the united kingdom. yeah, and if you let... i mean, i'll explain the nuances. that's why not an all or nothing thing. there are both direct and indirect effects of vaccination.

the direct effect is protecting people from getting ill, particularly getting seriously ill. so, once we've vaccinated everybody over the age of 50 and other clinical at—risk groups, we would expect if we managed to get for instance 80—90% coverage in those groups, then we would expect to drive mortality down — just keeping all those measures we have in place exactly as they are — drive mortality down by 80—90%. now, of course, we don't want to keep in lockdown forever. so, the trade—off, and this is not completely predictable ahead of time, that the trade—off will be as we protect more and more people, how much can we relax social distancing? and clearly, the more people we protect, the faster we can do it but i don't think we can make very accurate predictions about exactly how quickly we can relax measures partly because a critical aspect of how the vaccine works is not well understood.

mainly, how much it blocks transmission as well as just protecting people against disease. exactly, we don't know whether it blocks transmission, do we? we also don't know to be honest whether new strains, variations, mutations on this virus — we've talked about the british one but there's a very worrying one in south africa — could threaten the notion that these vaccinations protect us. the health secretary in the uk says he's very worried about the south african mutation. are you? i'm concerned about it. i mean, we just don't have the data at the moment but the immunologist, structural biologists i've talked to certainly are more concerned about that variant than the new variant in the uk just because there are changes to the critical receptor binding sites of the spike protein which is the thing vaccines target. but again, even if vaccines are less effective, it's unlikely they will be completely ineffective. it's more we'll see a reduction in efficacy. i think looking forward more than just the immediate next two or three or even next six months, we are going to be living

with coronavirus indefinitely. we are never going to eliminate it in the human population. it will evolve, and we will have to probably maybe even a little bit like influenza regularly update our vaccines. but the key issue is getting the scale of manufacturing capacity of vaccines and the delivery into people's arms such that we can reduce the burden of disease we are now seeing. and there will be many people watching this around the world thinking, "well, he's talking from london, "the uk is rolling out a vaccine programme, "but the chances of me getting a vaccine if i live in west africa, "latin america, wherever, it's going to take a very long time "because my country hasn't got the same resources, "it's not got its delivered vaccines already arranged, "and i'm extremely worried." do you believe there is going to be an international cooperative effort to make sure everybody around the world wherever they live does get this vaccine as soon as possible? well, there is an international

collaborative effort called covax coordinated by the world health organization, but i would say in my view it is woefully underfunded. the commitment from, frankly, high income countries to allow particularly the poorest countries in the world to get access to the vaccine has not been sufficient so far, and it will at this rate take many years for even the most vulnerable at—risk groups to be vaccinated in the poorest countries of the world. i mean, there's some silver linings. you will be aware that countries like brazil and india, two very large middle income, low—middle income countries actually have a lot of vaccine manufacturing capacity themselves and they have their own vaccine industries. and i think they will be scaling up and are currently scaling up production of vaccines like the 0xford/astrazeneca vaccine right now. so, i mean, it's not all bad news but undoubtedly, this is going to highlight like most crises do the inequity not just within countries

but between countries. let me ask you if i may a personal question at the very end. you've been through a pretty extraordinary 12 months yourself. you've become a major voice in the debate about responding to coronavirus in the uk. you were vilified because of a personal decision you took to entertain a woman friend during a lockdown in the uk when it wasjudged by the public and the press that you had outrageously broken the guidelines for lockdown. you've also been criticised for advocating lockdowns which, as we've discussed, threaten fundamental liberties of a democratic nation. what is your conclusion about the way in which the public and scientists interact? i think it's hard to summarise that in a single sentence. i mean, i think the attacks on me started well before my own grievous error ofjudgement as you mentioned

it, particularly from as you say, some at the libertarian right end of the spectrum. i think it's perfectly acceptable for people to have different opinions on what is the appropriate response. what is that balancing point between liberty and control of spread and public health, and people will have different judgements, and that's a judgement for politicians and everybody to make. and i don't actually think that scientists have any unique role beyond anybody else in society in making that judgement. where i have been disappointed, let's say, in some aspects of the debate is just the polarisation leading to basically disinformation around the science of trying to undermine notjust me, but scientists in north america, in germany, trying to undermine scientists who are identified as being on one side of let's say the "science policy" debate.

the other thing is being the sense that almost some media outlets presenting what i would call false balance, and we've seen it before in climate change debate of trying to give an impression that you have almost two equal sides, camps of scientists and public health people — one who are for lockdown for instance and one for let's say the great barrington declaration of shielding the elderly and letting the disease run through the population. there has never been that sort of balance. i would say 90—95% of the public health community has actually really come behind both the science which has been done, and there is a lot of scientific consensus, but also behind the policies which have been adopted. so, yeah, there have been disappointing elements. it's been at times difficult personally and for many of my colleagues notjust at imperial college but in many institutions around the world. it's also been a very rewarding year though in terms of hopefully making

a difference notjust in the uk. the centre i run advises countries around the world and has a global remit. and, yes, at being at the heart of a crisis quite of this magnitude. well, it isn't over yet sadly but professor neil ferguson, i thank you very much indeed for being on hardtalk, thank you. hello there. it was a very cold start to the weekend, a widespread frost, some ice around, also some freezing fog patches and some low cloud across southern areas which could linger throughout the rest of the day. we will see some sunshine around

though and across the north, this thick cloud is actually rain bearing cloud thanks to a weather front pushing in off the atlantic, so it will be quite wet for the north and west of scotland. some of that rain turning to snow over the high ground as it pushes its way further inland, but for much of northern ireland, southern scotland, england and wales, it should be dry with some sunshine although it could stay quite grey, some further freezing fog across the south and south—east. if that happens, temperatures really will struggle but it will be a cold day away from the north—west of scotland. tonight that weather front across scotland moves further southwards into northern england and pivots back round pushing more rain into western scotland, some of it could be quite heavy at times. another cold night to come particularly in the south where we have clear skies. not as cold as what we have seen in the last few nights. still cold enough for any rain falling on freezing surfaces to give an ice risk across eastern scotland, north—east england first thing tomorrow, sojust watch out for that. stays breezy and wet for the north—west of scotland, a bit of wintriness across higher ground again but for northern ireland, much of england and wales, should see the cloud tending

to break up to allow some sunny spells around. not a bad day in a store and look at those temperatures, a degree or so up particularly across northern and western areas. as we move out of sunday into monday, we've got higher pressure to the south. to the north, these weather fronts will bring some pretty wet weather to north—western areas. notice the isobars on the chart, so a slightly breezy day right across the board, that wind coming off the atlantic from the west or south—west, feeding in lots of cloud, outbreaks of rain, lots into northern and western areas. and this rain could be quite heavy at times with colder air still looming close to the north and east of the country. some rain will fall as snow certainly over higher ground but a milder day to come across the board, seven to 9 degrees. best of the sunshine across south—east england. that rain spreads across the whole country as we head through tuesday and then we will see a run of northerly winds for a while. a battle of the air masses as we move through the new week, colder air always looming to the north and east, then another wedge of milder air trying to push on from the west to bring further rain at times. generally next week there will be

less coldness than of late, there will be rain at times moving in off the atlantic, some of this will turn to snow, particularly on northern hills.

this is bbc news with the latest headlines. buckingham palace confirms that the queen and the duke of edinburgh have today received covid—i9 vaccinations. act like you have the virus — that's the advice in a new campaign in the uk urging people to abide by lockdown rules. a boeing 737, believed to be carrying around 60 people, has gone missing after take—off in indonesia. donald trump is banned permanently from twitter because of concerns his tweets could incite more violence. democrats reveal the draft of a new impeachment resolution against donald trump — the president elect accuses him of inciting an insurrection and endangering the security of the us. he has been an embarrassment to the country.