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Hello and welcome to a special Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots.

I'm Katie Balls and I'm joined by Fraser Nelson and James Forsyfe.

Has the UK reached herd immunity? They've been reports that we're edging there. Fraser, in your

telegraph column, you look at where we are on this. And it's fair to say the phrase herd immunity hasn't

always been in vogue. In fact, it seems quite toxic.

Yes, in the very early days of the pandemic, you had Patrick Valens, the chief scientific

advisor, using what he thought was fairly uncontroversial language. He was saying the way that

epidemics work is that they keep spreading until a country hits herd immunity, and there's

nothing you can really do to prevent that.

If you lock down, he was saying, you simply delay it, so people get hit later on.

Now, he was then amazed to find himself accused of a strategy to basically slaughter the elderly,

and then Boris Johnson ended up with the same thing.

Heard immunity became, to be seen to be

code for the willful policy of letting anybody over 60 die to protect the economy. So it hasn't

been mentioned ever since, but it is back. Now, what I was quite surprised to discover is that the government actually

not only does it imagine herd immunity is going to happen in the third quarter of this year,

so that is before the end of September, but it also thinks that this is part of the unpublished

roadmap. Now, we did a cover this week about the roadmap we all know about, ends

on the 21st of June, when at that point, restrictions and numbers are going to be lifted.

But there is a bridge required, as far as the government is concerned, between that point

...