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Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones. It's Tuesday the 2nd of March, though we're recording this on the morning of Monday the 1st, St David's Day.

I'm speaking with Catherine Moore, a consultant clinical

virologist at Public Health Wales, and Rupert Beale, a clinician scientist group leader at the

Francis Crick Institute. We're going to be talking about COVID-19, vaccines, variants and

possible ways out of the pandemic. It's almost a year since Rupert Beale wrote his first piece for the LRB on COVID-19.

His fifth appears in the current issue.

This is his sixth appearance on the podcast.

He was full of praise last spring for the advice his lab had got from public health Wales

when they were developing testing kits.

So it's a great pleasure to have Catherine Moore joining us today as

well. Rupert, Catherine, thank you both very much for finding the time to talk to me. Good morning.

Yeah, morning. So if we start with the good news, the vaccine rollout in the UK seems to be going

astonishingly well. A series of early gambols, informed gambles, no doubt,

seemed to be paying off the decision to order the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines in large

quantities, the decision to focus on administering first doses and delaying the follow-ups,

...