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Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones. It's Tuesday the 1st of September and today I'm speaking with Rupert Beale, a clinician scientist group leader

at the Francis Crick Institute, who has written three pieces for the LRB on COVID-19 since the pandemic began six months and several lifetimes ago. Most recently in our last

summer issue, and this is his fourth appearance on the podcast. Hello, Rupert, and thank you very much

for finding the time to join us again. Hello, Tom. It's nice to speak to you again.

You wrote your last piece for the

paper on the 31st of July in which you expressed some cautious optimism, genuine grounds for hope,

you said. Better, quicker tests, more effective therapies, and most important, several strong

vaccine candidates have made it to final stage clinical trials. And how have those trials progressed

over the last month or so? Has the news got any better or any worse? Well, I think it's important

to point out that I was describing different kinds of vaccine, more than I was describing

particular vaccine candidates. There isn't any sort of enormously ground-changing news

about those different kinds of vaccine candidates as far as their sort of efficacy goes. We don't

have the reports from phase three trials. Those are expected perhaps to be sort of end of October,

beginning of November before we have data

on those. It could easily be longer. There have been certain development. So one is a different

sort of vaccine candidate that's also showing promise. So in the article, I referenced the simple

idea of killing the live virus, the idea of making

...