COVID cases are still falling across Britain. And with 88% of adults at least partially vaccinated,

even if there is a resurgence of the virus. For most people in the UK at least, it should be a

relatively mild disease. That's the optimistic take on the future of the pandemic in Britain.

So what about the pessimistic take? Well, in that scenario, the government allowing the virus

to circulate among a partially vaccinated population allows a vaccine resistant mutation

to develop potentially taking us back to square one. If we want to be really fatalistic,

we can imagine that we end up in a situation even worse than spring 2020 as the virus by this

point has evolved to become more transmissible and more deadly. This is all incredibly speculative,

but it's a very relevant, sorry, topic for tonight's show because it featured in a sage document

released last Friday, which has created some pretty scary headlines. We'll be speaking to an

expert on viruses and vaccines. I'm also joined tonight throughout the show, of course,

by Ash Sarkar. How are you doing, Ash? I'm good feeling like a mutant variant over here, but all good.

It's one of those shows where I'm not precisely sure what our experts are going to say. So I don't

know if it's going to be incredibly scary or somewhat reassuring. So we're all going to, you can

see the emotional journey on my face as the show develops. Also tonight, we'll be talking about

Pfizer and Moderna jacking up vaccine prices and the athletes speaking out about mental health

at the Tokyo Olympics. It's a long, a continuing story there. In the recent tranche of documents

released by the scientific advisory group on emergencies, better known as sage, there was one

particular report, which has caused a great deal of concerns. It covers the possibility of new

variants of COVID-19 emerging, including those which are more transmissible, more deadly, or more

resistant to vaccines than the current dominant delta strain. The document lays out a number of

scenarios to which it assigns probabilities, all quite speculative, but they're saying these things

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