Summary
In this episode of Business Weekly we’ll be looking a the idea of covid-19 immunity passports. Could they be a willy wonka-esque golden ticket that frees the owner from lockdown if they’ve had the disease? Some businesses and governments are certainly hopeful. However, the WHO warns that it doesn’t know how much immunity Covid survivors get. We will debate the pros and cons. With Hollywood halted, what will the future of film be after the pandemic? Will we stay happily streaming from our sofas, leaving cinemas obsolete? We’ll also take a look at some of the dubious cures for the Coronavirus that have been advertised on social media. Clearly none of them work, so why are people taken in? And we look back at the life and times of the King of Gambling, Macau’s Stanley Ho, who died this week. Presented by Lucy Burton.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, if a week is a long time in politics, a day is a long time in business at the moment, |
| 0:06.1 | and it can be exhausting trying to keep up with all the latest developments. |
| 0:10.1 | That's why we've interrupted your Business Daily pod feed to bring you Business Weekly, |
| 0:14.4 | a new weekend programme which brings you an hour of the most interesting, inspiring and thought-provoking stories you might have missed |
| 0:21.7 | from the BBC's business team. |
| 0:27.9 | Hello, thank you for joining me here on the BBC World Service. I'm Lucy Burton, and this |
| 0:33.6 | is Business Weekly. On the show today, we'll be taking a look at the life and times of the |
| 0:39.0 | flamboyant godfather of gambling, Stanley Ho, who died on Tuesday. We'll also be debunking some of |
| 0:45.8 | the biggest coronavirus cure claims, from the President of the United States to a friend's |
| 0:51.3 | friend on Facebook, everybody's got an opinion on how to protect themselves |
| 0:55.0 | from COVID-19. And disinformation is as hard to stop as the disease itself. One thing that really is |
| 1:02.3 | being considered, though, is the concept of an immunity passport. Once you've battled through |
| 1:07.7 | COVID, there's a chance that you may be, at least temporarily |
| 1:10.9 | immune. So some governments are considering introducing special documentation, exempting corona |
| 1:17.2 | survivors from social distancing and travel rules. There are obvious positives to that. Some people |
| 1:22.7 | could get back to work and the economy could get moving. But there are some huge flaws in this proposal as well. |
| 1:29.4 | My colleague Ed Butler has been looking into it and Ed will take a listen to your report in just a |
| 1:33.8 | second. But it seems to me that there's one big issue here and that's that no one knows how long |
| 1:38.8 | immunity could last for if indeed you get some immunity. So how could all of this work? |
| 1:43.8 | First of all, picture the joy, I suppose, that the prize that everybody is reaching for here, |
| 1:50.1 | which is the idea that potentially as many as, I don't know, one in five of us, |
| 1:54.2 | if you're looking at some of the hotspots around the world where COVID-19 has really |
... |
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