i would love you to do it. i think you will please. i'm plastic. now past you've got the lex, you've got the shirt, you've got the body, you're just perfection. you. we fantastic. strictly speaking with you the rubbish as well. one of my favorite actors and a voice i use often when i get those phone calls from the call centers that want to sell you something. i don't think you are. my name's john. i don't know what you want. i just need to know how long you've been registered at your current address. if you're looking for run some, i don't have money. i do have a very particular set of skills skills i have acquired over a long period of time skills nightmare for people like you. okay, i'll call them right off the very talented kit. robbins and louis mclean, and for hamid says, fantastic, still couldn't stop laughing. amber love, it says last week she was excellent and had us instead chess kept robinson lewis mc light are hilarious and just what we need right now. thank you to all at the alec

salmon. sure. and a happy and safe new year from amber and and do we have nickel says absolutely brilliant. all a very bare cities. couple of days later, but tonight i got a breath of fresh air. thank you. and finally, craig jackson said hugely funny. watched it twice. 32nd time funny than the 1st nor day we'll watch again and again. well, i'm glad we could have some light relief over the festive season, but no back to the serious business of croon of either such faces us all not even in countries heavily vaccinated on the con has broken through to infect millions. although the vaccines have been successful and limiting the impact of the virus, however, what will be the possession and the many countries who have as yet hardly begun mass vaccinations. doctor john came get his assessment to alex. donna can welcome back. so this i'll examine, shall i, pleasure, hello,

what you happy new year? happy year 2 years. well now, if we look at lee infection that will weighed and, and conscious highly vaccinated come to light. the u. k. france, america, the number of people in faith is running at the 1000000 spend week from the all mcclellan variant, but edna and korea is just a few 1000. i to explain the differences between some counties which are, are heavily infected by the new variant and others which seemed to be as yet escaping. so i think, you know, the, if we think about lines of defense, and really if we think about it as a war, in the 1st line of defense are the things that we can all do that we know prevent infection itself that would be distancing, mask supporting crowds, good hygiene, hand washing and things. the 2nd line of defense is vaccination. and you know, korea is up into the 80 percent range now and it for full vaccination as well. and,

you know, many of the countries are struggling to get above 70 percent. i mean, the united states still in the 60 percent range, imagine the united states has 350000000 people. that's 40 percent of 350000000. that's a 120000000 unvaccinated people. and each one of them, a potential target for the virus. the 3rd line of defense are the things that we do medically. you know, we can treat people. now we have good drugs. we have that are all we have a solution which keeps people from infecting other people. and the final thing is the things that governments can do. and they are things that we really hate, you know, things like vaccine passes and vaccine passports and all these things. but the governments have to do that, and when you look at asia or australia, the government were very effective in mobilizing people to support the idea behind isolation, behind masks, behind distancing. and so that's actually still working as a 1st line of defense. adding on to that now the layer of vaccination and good treatment. you know, you really are able to impact coded 19

a lot better than than places where you don't have that 1st line of defense. think the other thing about a crime is you know, and again, you know, and unfortunately omicron is not the end of the greek alphabet. it's not the omega . so we're going to have very additional variance develop. but on the ground has the ability to infect people who've been vaccinated, and to in fact, people who've been naturally impacted. now of course vaccination does what it's supposed to do, even with, we know it reduces ation. we know what reduces death. so we have to vaccinate unvaccinated populations, and that means you know, special inducements. getting people and getting children vaccinated are really important. you know, we started to see here in korea, a number of outbreaks in child care settings. and then the government has really made a push to get parents to vaccinate their kids. and in countries you know, like the u. k or, or in korea, we're 95 percent of children are vaccinated against measles. it seems almost

inconceivable that we couldn't get parents to be concerned enough to vaccinate their children against coding. so are you saying that there was a seems to show the school a key vector off the infection in this latest, really? as it has been a vaccinated who are the and vaccinated now they're the people who didn't get vaccinated during the initial rounds during the initial push and then children. so in the united states, we're seeing record numbers, numbers of children being hospitalized. we're seeing increasing numbers of children all over the world, getting sick now, you know, they don't get as sick as adults, but it doesn't take much. i mean, we don't have as many pediatric beds in hospitals so that it isn't going to take as much to fill them up. and that would be a horrible thing. looking at the statistics intellectually, totally explain how the france and the u. k. and america, millions of cases

a week will as many come to this in the law firm since i was shot to the spot to split. that's a great question. and it actually raises the, the issue that there actually 3 gaps. the 1st step is, you know, been, we've been talking about this for the past year is the supply of vaccine get so high income countries preferentially got vaccine? first loan can countries got it and, and are still receiving it. 91 percent of those people living in low income countries have not seen the 1st dose. i've actually the 2nd guy, and this is becoming clear now as faxing supplies becoming less of an issue. is the vaccination yet? so again, just because you have that doesn't mean the country's going to deployed effectively and is that that magical threshold of her protection going to be at 70 percent? probably not. 80 percent. again, we're looking like it may not be you know, 90 to 95 percent. no. or will we ever get there?

there are some people are saying, you know, we're going to have to get through this the old fashioned way. yes. we can keep people out of the hospital with vaccination, but you know, coded will develop and, and newtons will arise and eventually people will become exposed and, and you know, will be relatively protected. and i guess the final gap, and this is when we haven't talked much about, it's a $2000000000.00 gap and diagnostics. so when you look at the high income countries, they're doing hundreds of coping tests per $100000.00 people in the population. when you look in africa, it's almost 0. so they're not that you know, you only find an infection and look for the other part of it is the sequencing get, you know, where are the mutants arising mutants are arising and outbreaks. there were outbreaks in africa that we weren't aware of and mutants or have arisen out of some of them, like the beta me door now the, i'm a crime the delta mutant in india. so these gaps are the source of problems.

they're prolonging coded and they're generating variance and the variance have the potential to undermine the progress that we've made in the development of vaccines . and, you know, assessment for adults. kim lee, it almost want to mabe's from unvaccinated country somewhere. africa. all was a close spacious interaction between humans and animals. when we have it all mcclellan come from another great question. so remember our breaks generate variance variance generate outbreaks and it's a vicious cycle. and it started a road somewhere in southern africa, possibly as a result of an infection of a person with an immuno compromising condition. and you can imagine several, but a common one would be, you know, h i, v infection which suppresses the body's ability to respond to infection. so unlike post not infect but h i, b, n, h i v, infected persons immune system doesn't jump on the virus and suppress it and kick

it out of the body in 2 weeks. what happens is the infection is prolonged and every time the body, it's kind of like the immune system. the defensive system is moving in slow motion . so as it throws a punch, the virus started as it throws another punch, the virus started. so instead of being something where the immune system knocks the virus out, the virus is able to adapt and evolve against the mean system. and so it's thought that maybe i'm a credit arose in a situation like that because it has so many mutations in it. i mean, many of them we've seen before, but never in this particular combination and never so many and number as we see with probably standpoint of the international. but traditional institute, if you were to have a riling call this new year of us 2022 to the leaders. what would that be? so 2021 was the year vaccines 2022 should be the year of vaccination.

so all those people in the world who are unvaccinated, and that would be about, well, just under 40 percent, now i've not received the single dose and 90 percent of the people and low income countries have not been vaccinated at all. we need to vaccinate everybody, and now, you know, as i'm a kind of spreading, we recognize that we may need booster doses as well. so, vaccination, complete vaccination, maybe the original series, the 2, the 2 jobs got originally plus a booster. and you know, we need to get boosters every 6 months. i hope not. that may be unrealistic. but it's going to be very important to make sure that people are fully vaccinated in order to gain the benefit of vaccination, reducing hospitalizations and dr. kim, increasingly, in policy makers we, he'll the, the phrase we're going to have to learn to live with us. is that possible human kind going to have to adapt to the presence of this virus?

this condition is going to be ever with us. yes. so in particular among the current versus coven 19, you know, as it's evolved, as it's infected, more and more people. as we've rolled out back scenes, we're going to have to start thinking about this. probably the same way we think about him to windsor or the flu, that there may be additional or changes in the virus that require additional vaccinations. we hope that at some point, the research that, that many groups are doing to develop what we call a pan cobra, 1900 vaccine, a vaccine worked against potentially the current and future maintenance or a pan corona virus. actually, when that works against not only this current of ours, that causes kogan but the corona virus, that causes the middle east respiratory syndrome where the original sars of ours that up, that up hand corner of our expects. you may actually protect us even better against potential upgrade in the future, but that's actually work,

it's years away. and so for now, i think the idea that we're going to have to adjust to this, the countries are going to have to back, that we have to do everything possible to preserve life, to preserve human rights and the bill you people to, to make informed choices and then finally, to preserve livelihood. so you know, the old life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness comes back in a different way. we look at a pandemic, you know, we've been living with influenza for millennia. we're going to have to adjust and do what we can now tempered and given an additional weapons to protect life by medical science. but this is something that countries are going to have to deal with. a policy will go to job kim. thank you so much for joining us once again on the alex on show. thank you and happy new year again. coming up after the break, alex tend to cambridge, you know, 1st is dr. k smith for an explanation as to why the fight. is it under control?

join our now we have the cigarettes, i just heard that it was a healthy alternative to cigarettes and do we trust tobacco companies with their message that these new products are actually going to reduce these sugars are making the tobacco tours with

welcome back. those are cosmetic, throughout the crisis has been one of the most effective communicators on the development of the vitus. he nice speaks to alex dot chris most welcome back to the alex simon. sean, happy new year. yes indeed, happy new year. but of course, so chris has some new you new volume's up because i was different. is this a strain of the virus and from the other strains like like delta? well they're all part of the same family. and they all therefore related because they are all corona viruses and their corona viruses, which are part of this code bit 19 family. but when only chrome was 1st detected in

southern africa, it was actually quite see who is the g p. and in south africa who 1st noticed that a slew of patients are coming to her surgery with similar symptoms, but quite remote from the highly truancy that we've been using to diagnose covey. prior to that time of loss of sense of smell and taste, new cough, high fever, these patients were presenting a bit differently. they had a sort of scratchy sore throat. that of a fever bit of a coughing felt very, very tired, but otherwise they were pretty trivially on well and, and it was thanks to her spotting that there was some pattern and testing these people that actually own chrome came to light. otherwise it probably wouldn't do, but when she tested these patients, that's when really the alarm bells began to ring because the genetic code said no, i'm a chrome, but oh my god. and what they showed is a very big group of mutations or changes 50 or so genetic spelling mistakes in this

particular virus compared to the previous strains. we've seen some of those genetic changes we had seen before. some were new, but we've never seen so many of them all in one place at the same time, with a big concentration of them in the part of the virus code that it uses to make the outer co to the virus. and specifically the spike that it uses to get into our cells. and that's the thing that was in all the vaccines, which is why people were concerned. we might have a very transmissible bearing on our hands. that transpired to be absolutely the case. but because of ours is also changed so dramatically, it's altered, it's modus operandi. it's changed tactics. it gets into our cells in a different way. and the consequence of that is it seems to be producing less of a illness when it does, in fact people, despite being able to infect many more people than previous variance. but can we tell if, if alma coupon developed some point in the late last year when doctor c identified it, or has it been sleeping somewhere for, for the last year or so,

and only as know detected because to manifest system like south africa helps us the will do test, we don't know, the likelihood is this is what we call a de novo mutation. in the sense that it hasn't circulated broadly. and the profile of changes, it has strongly suggests that this has been developing or growing soon. the single individual actually for a long period of time, we saw a similar thing with the so called kent or alpha variance about a year ago. and this was suggested to have arisen in the u. k. in an individual who was immunosuppressed. and if you are immunosuppressed, you don't fight the virus off quite as well as someone who's not immunosuppressed. and this gives the virus lots of time to adapt change and evolve within an individual seeing a partial immune response. and therefore, learning something about and adapting to our immune responses. it's possible that

in that part of southern africa, where this oma, chrome barron evolved and emerged from because it's very high prevalence, they mean disabling diseases. chiefly h, i v. where in some parts of south africa you looking at the prevalence of 50 percent or more of the population treated thankfully most of them, but many not. this means you're, you've got virus infecting people with an impaired immune response on top of malnutrition, poor living conditions. and so in all of which can conspire to make the situation worse. and that could have led to the elaboration of all these changes in this virus. and the production of only chromos, one theory, we don't know for sure at the moment if that's the right one way back in the 990 s, there was what we thought was a flu pandemic. in fact, it was called the russian flu. and this was a pandemic. it led to very wide scale mortality, and including members of queen victoria's household actually died of a so called flu pandemic. but in recent years, scientists have done some molecular forensics,

and what they think actually was happening was that was a corona virus. in fact, it was a bo vinyl cow corona virus. that because we were keeping large numbers of cows jump, the species barrier got into humans, became a human pandemic, corona virus, which we had never seen before. so it made people very ill to start with spread very broadly because no one was immune to it. but quite quickly, effectively immunize the entire world population, and then retreated into the background accruing along the way, some genetic changes in the virus that made it a better bedfellow with humans. and that virus persists to this day. as of ours, exciting the code o c. 43, but it's a common human corona virus. it causes the common codes, so we speculate the corona virus causing covey. it will go the same way alternately . it's just the path we take to get there. hopefully, we don't suffer the death toll, but previous pandemic strains would have had to cause in order to get that we can short circuit the equation with drugs and vaccines. like you've been one of the 1st

scientists to right, let's going to look at some point. but living along said the corona virus. what exactly do you mean by that? and this is the danger when death told the u. k. well, this is a mild, a strain of the illness is still $300.00 or so a day, which is like a plane crash every single day. so the idea that some mild of illness is relative to the other variance. it's worth highlighting that actually a jumbo jet crash every day is roughly the number of people who die because it's smoking cigarettes. and this is a tiny number of people who will be killed ultimately by the pandemic, which reset into which is overweight. obesity malnutrition, which is affecting half the world population right now. but that's one side. yes, i think we are now seeing pretty much across the board. even countries that had pursued a very, very strong, very powerful 0 covey approach to start with accepting that we are seeing an

endemic disease. we're seeing something which is not going to go away in the foreseeable future. and therefore, we have to make a plan for how we work alongside it. we tolerated, we control it, but we can't eradicate it. the right thing to do when you 1st see an emerging infection or in a new disease, is to respond to very vigorously, very strongly. and you expect that you are going to be out of control it. basically, you're planning for the fact that you can stop this thing, but then you have to accept to some point, you might not be able to know. that's what new zealand did this one strange did. they use that geography and other tactics to control the virus and keep it to really low levels, but they have had to accept. but unless they want to keep their countries completely isolated for ever, then they're gonna have to at some point, accept the virus into their country and end up with cases which is what's now happening. australia has got very, very high levels of cases, for example. so really it's a question of migrating from the state with as really high levels of virus activity

to controlled, tolerated levels of ours activity, but ones which are with few consequences. and there's a difference between cases that cause consequences and cases the don't cause consequences. we accept at the same time, this is an infection that is not going to go away in the sample future. finally, chris smith, a vaccines, came to science, came to a rescue. a on the con, partially evades some of the vaccines we have, but they still emilio, the condition and sort of hope that there will be a more traditional vaccine imagine taking longer to, to, to produce a, which will operate against all barriers. so a whole virus vaccine is that on the horizon or in the near future. this is what scientists dubbing covey vaccine to point note. and there's a number of avenues to consider here this week. just gone. we've seen some quite exciting data actually from the u. k. where they've compared people who live with

people who corcoran virus and got it. and people who live with people who caught cry of ours and didn't get it. and i asked the question, why does some people despite very close contact with front of our case is not catch the infection looks like those people who are immune to infection from their housemates actually have various immune functions given to them by prior exposure to other corona, viruses and so this leads us to, to speculate that because of this family of ours is there are some parts of the virus that never change. it doesn't matter what they're talking about. the virus has the linchpin components which can never vary. if we make an immune response against those, it seems to protect us broadly against many members of the same family viruses. so one very tempting tantalizing and hopefully really reasonable realistic prospect is that we might, vaccines that incorporate some of those crucial lynch in bits of the virus that

never change from one baron to the next. if we do that, we will have koby vaccine 2 point note, which will protect us, not just against the parents. we do know, but those that don't even exist yet. scientists working on at the moment, i missed some evidence about is likely to be possible in the near term though, the current focus is on updating the current vaccines. we do have to better reflect the variance of the circulating so that we get protection against those using tried and trusted and tested technology in the near term while continuing to develop these other more ambitious strategies. longer term which, which is going to take a while. and that type of thing from july thing, an optimistic note, dr. chris smith. thank you so much for joining inflation again on the simon show, this christmas came as an unwelcome shock to the governments of the u. s. at france and britain. 3 of the most vaccinated countries on the planet, with armor convenience, surging out of control splits merged within the ford administrations of the u. k and within the governing conservative party. but how to deal with the resurgent

vidas in america present biden placed the emphasis on the individual states for bias control, which significantly was not the approach he took as a candidate when president trump was facing runaway infection rates. meanwhile, in france, present macro tried to turn up the heat on and vaccinated, but also succeeded in dividing french opinion. the bike since have substantially weakened the link between the infection, hospitalization and death, world wide, up to 50000 dis, are still being recorded each and every week. and even highly vaccinated countries have clearly failed to crack the epidemic. meanwhile, the pace of the rule out of the vaccine to the developing world still looks at responsibly, slew the emotions of or macro, and has been a humbling lesson for policymakers. but they can't say they went well warned about the likelihood of a hyper infectious obedient indeed human kind may have towards the on the coin

bullet, given that generally less grieve nature of the disease. it presents more substantial progress has come in the range of new treatments once people are infected. however, the sheer weight of numbers has placed health provision even in the most advanced countries under enormous pressure. now, increasingly common teachers are looking forward to a world where human kind learns to live alongside with the virus or pandemic. smith at some stage finance eric phase. but given the vast numbers of people unprotected worldwide, the certainty of a yet more valence and the cumulative pressure on health provision. for far, far too many people will not be a question of living with the virus, but of dying from it. for nice mallets, myself and all that the sure it's good bye, stacy. i'm hope to see you all again next week. ah

ah. back to either a financial a like a report going a gone other call them right now they stopped. yes yes i didn't receive that. will i least the typical there's only 9 but already university students that away on slash a you've got the was restored to deal with

a with no recalls. he really shows control such programs. now brochure, nebraska, of course with level you're special, but i was the yeah my i just have a 1st grade and i was thinking what the plan was to get on the she was in your mind shifting this i'm did it with his teacher was reason this one is a good time i a so called enhanced interrogation techniques used by the u. s. officials

were basically designed as techniques to break down the human mind. if you force a human being to stay in a certain position doesn't take very long to the pain involved to become absolutely excruciating, but nobody's lean finger on you. you are doing it to yourself. we started adopting those techniques when i was station and mosul among them were stress position, sleep deprivation and do some type of therm. yeah. there's already beginning to be evidence that these old techniques are now being used on immigrant children, whatever you do or more. and it comes from home, nobody has been held accountable for the torture that happened in the past. the moral authority, the made america awarded, or sacrifice for the shimmer of effective interrogation.

ah, when i went into that garden, just after 6 on the 20th of may, 2020, i believed implicitly that this was a work didn't british families are outraged from doris johnson's apology. after he admitted attending a downing street party during the gaze 2020 national lockdown, we spoke to a man who buried his father during that period of the same time that i was at my father's funeral. he was taking and bringing your own views. part it. why does he believe that he knew how to create that he made? didn't apply to him, have the job all pay the tab counter. this pullback province is planning to punish the unvaccinated with.