we are delighted for wisdom and insight to be joined by howard davies. sir howard has been very generous with his time. we have always kissed him on exit. i'm looking forward to the day where we don't need to talk about another brexit deadline having been and gone. what does it mean for the city of london? has finance moved on? is there anything -- are there any contingency plans you're putting in place? and good morning. howard: good morning. i'm afraid i'm suffering from brexit deadline anxiety. there is no doubt one german word that captures that. in this we don't really know when if ever this deal is going to be finished. but on your question about the city, i think everybody who needs to do -- not everybody, but all the businesses i know about who needed to do something specific in the city to cope with brexit at the end of the year have done. reallyancial deer is not part of this negotiation -- through financial deal is not really a part of this negotiation. we know after the first we will be out. the deal is relevant to finance because if we leave

in the next hour, we speak with sir howard davis. -- or howard davies.peak with him about the banking sector. all of that coming up, and this is bloomberg. ♪ francine: another shot. boris johnson and ursula von der leyen extend brexit talks with yet another deadline ignored. lawmakers in washington will unveil a $908 billion pandemic relief bill today. steven mnuchin and nancy pelosi are set to speak again. futures higher in the u.s.. plus, astrazeneca lands a $39 billion megadeal to take over alexion pharmaceuticals. it's the company's biggest deal since it was founded. good morning, everyone, and welcome to "bloomberg surveillance." i'm francine lacqua in london. lisa abramowicz in new york. tom keene off, chopping a tree or something like that. is a lot to talk about. and kind of tired of brexit. i know most of the people watching are tired of brexit, but it is the final stretch, and i want to remind everyone, december 31 is not a moving deadline. they should not be able to go over. lisa: which is key. jon ferro, my colleague, is always talkiut

davis, but not necessarily living there. >> i want to share, in addition to you and i speaking right now for our audience, on the left side of the screen, howardre seeing vaccines take place right now. talk to us about how you made these tests significantly cheap sler. for most of us who want to get those at-home saliva tests, they cost $100 to 150 bucks. >> yeah, well, we happen to be a big ag research school so, of course, we turned to ag biotech and we ended up using a platform that was designed really for looking at plant pathogens, looking at dna rna for plant pathogens. you have little microwells for these pcr reaction. it's a higher through put platform than with some of the other commercial machines. that was one thing we did. we worked with a couple of vendors to perfect that and ran the first three weeks or so with our testing, we ran that in parallel with nasal testing from a commercial lab to make sure we had results that were concordance. we're able to do higher capacity testing at much lower cost. the unit cost may be in the order of $6 per unit. now that's not including aq acquisition costs, but that's an order magnitude lower t