BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts

Hello, I'm Lauren LeVern and this is the Desert Island Disks Podcast.

Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them

if they were cast away to a desert island. And for right reasons the music is shorter than the

original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.

My cast away today is the medical scientist Professor Sahjara Mifara. He's director of the Welcome Trust,

the UK's largest, richest medical research charity. A specialist in infectious diseases,

it was the arrival of the HIV infection when he was a young neurologist that persuaded him to move

into public health and focus on emerging epidemics. He's lived and worked through many

sins in a career that's taken him all over the world. SARS, bird flu, dengue fever, Ebola,

Zika and now coronavirus. Through each crisis he has driven to help those affected

and to facilitate groundbreaking research. He's now lending his expertise to the Sage Committee

and the UK Government's vaccine task force in the fight against COVID-19. He was knighted

for his services to medicine last year but his stellar career was by no means a certainty.

As an aspiring student he found a place at medical school by literally going door to door

until someone let him in. Now after a lifetime at the front line of medicine he's a believer

in the benefits of becoming comfortable with and effective during periods of uncertainty.

He says there are no rules, there are no textbooks to follow here. These are judgment calls

made in the very best faith but in tremendous difficulty. Professor Sahjara Mifara

welcomed it as an island discs. Yeah thanks very much indeed. So let's start with a breakthrough

then. You are as I mentioned currently member of the Sage team advising the government on COVID-19.

What's your reaction to the news that not one but numerous vaccines are on their way?

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