Hello, hello. Thank you for coming. Welcome to the Leicester Square Theatre in London for

the first Ogreldewort now live of 2022. We are podcasting and live streaming this edition

on Zoom. So, hello, wherever you are listening to this, whenever you are listening to this. But

thanks most of all for people who have actually come, physically with their bodies. I'm

Tori Inlandsky. When we booked this show at the end of last year, we're expecting an evening

of entertaining nonsense about party gate. But the cursed title of the podcast is struck

again and we find ourselves discussing the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Or as Matthew Goodwin

puts it, a unique opportunity to reboot Boris Johnson's Premiership. Then, in part two, we'll

be coming home to a comfort zone of talking about how awful Boris Johnson's Premiership is

followed by some audience questions. Let's meet the panel. Ros Taylor edits the LSE COVID

blog. Hi, Ros. Hello, Dine. The worldwide... Keep it light. The worldwide COVID death toll has

just passed six million. But the world's attention is elsewhere. What is, from your LSE

desk, the feeling about the state of play with COVID could a new variant change everything?

Is there a sense that it's not over over, but over in the sense that we've been living

with it for two years? Not going to hold you to it, like you know, too. It's not legally

binding. We're certainly all exhausted by it. There's

no doubt about that. I mean, it's not over. It's going to become endemic. It's the good

news is that even if there is a new variant and there will certainly be, at some point,

98.3% of us in England now have antibodies to COVID, either because we've had it or we've

vaccinated or both. So that is a good place to be where do you move forward? Because if you're

infected with a new variant of COVID, then you are very unlikely to get as ill as you might

have become, had you been infected in the first wave? So that is good. I think there will

...