Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker.

The world is united in the fervent hope that 2021 will be the year in which extraordinary scientific achievement overcomes the threat posed by the COVID-19 virus.

Various coronavirus vaccines have been declared effective and safe and will be rolled out in the course of this year.

But, and it's a huge, but, the virus continues to take lives and threaten public health, while the vast majority of the world's population remains unprotected.

Some countries have very effectively controlled

the spread of coronavirus. Vietnam, South Korea, New Zealand come to mind. But many others

have been much less successful, including the United States and a host of nations in Europe.

The UK is back in a national lockdown, struggling to contain a surge of

infections linked to a new strain of the virus deemed to be much more infectious than any seen before.

My guest today is the influential epidemiologist Professor Neil Ferguson, whose advice in the early

days of the pandemic played a key

role in shaping the UK government's response. Has Britain got its COVID strategy wrong?

Professor Neil Ferguson, welcome to hard talk. Thank you for having me.

How bleak would you say is Britain's COVID situation right now?

I think it's probably second only to the situation we were in 22nd of March before lockdown

in terms of really the prospects going forward.

And in some ways, bleak is still, and the new variant of the virus everybody will have

heard about transmits considerably more effectively than our previous variants probably 50 to 70

percent more transmissible and that means control measures which have worked in the past to

contain spread may not work in the future. The one silver

lining, of course, is that we are rolling out vaccine now in the UK. And the faster we can do that,

the faster we can protect people and reduce the toll of disease we're seeing currently.

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