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Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones. It's Tuesday

the 8th of December, though we're recording this on the evening of Monday the 7th. I don't think much

will change between now and then, though in this pandemic and with this government, you never know.

I'm speaking with Rupert Beale, a clinician scientist group leader at the Francis Crick Institute,

who has written four pieces for the LRB on COVID-19 since the pandemic began nine months ago.

Most recently, in our latest Christmas issue, This is his fifth appearance on the podcast.

Hello, Rupert, and thank you very much for finding the time to talk to me again.

Hello, Tom.

At the end of July, in our summer issue, you wrote that several strong vaccine candidates

have made it to final stage clinical trials.

Those trials have now finished for several vaccines, and we, when I say we, I mean they

or perhaps you are beginning to vaccinate people this week. That's unprecedented, isn't it,

to be administering a vaccine for a virus that we didn't even know existed a year ago?

It is absolutely unprecedented. I mean, I should say that the trials haven't stopped.

They've reached an end point, a sort of an intermediate point, pre-specified when it was known or when it could be known, that they were going to be efficacious. So the trials are ongoing and will get a lot more data from those trials as they progress. But yes, the achievement is absolutely extraordinary.

...