You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service. This is Hard Talk with me, Stephen Sacker.

Thanks for downloading this edition of the program. I do hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today has

devoted his professional life to the understanding and control of deadly infectious disease.

Ian Lipkin is the director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University in New York.

His team is involved in a collaborative international effort to better understand the novel COVID-19 virus, its origin and how best to treat, control, and

ultimately eradicate it.

Professor Lipkin could be forgiven a sense of deja vu as this pandemic has spread across the

world.

It is a narrative which has uncanny echoes of the Hollywood film Contagion, for which he provided the scientific expertise and advice back in 2011.

In the movie, as in real life, the virus spreads rapidly. Scientists and politicians are stretched to the limit.

Panic threatens to destabilise society

and the race to find a vaccine holds the key to a happy ending. In real life, of course,

resolution isn't easy to deliver. So six months into this pandemic, how are we doing? Well,

Professor Ian Lipkin joins me now from New York.

Welcome to Hard Talk. Good to be with you. Let me start with something you said just a few weeks ago.

You said it would not surprise me if a substantial proportion of the entire world population becomes

infected with COVID-19. Do you still feel that way today? I do. It will take some time,

but this virus is spreading across the world at enormous speed. And the only thing really

between us and bona fide infection of the entire world

really is a vaccine. And that's several months away. The knowledge base upon which we develop our

efforts to combat COVID-19, is it still quite narrow or has it expanded massively over the past three months?

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