Infectious Disease Expert Discusses Future Waves of COVID-19

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Let me start by asking you something that you’ve promoted this week and with the former prime minister, Gordon Brown. You’re calling for a global response now, right? I mean, are you saying that there hasn’t been? Because we keep hearing from various different capitals about what they’re doing. What exactly are you calling for, and also, trying to get private business on board?

JEREMY FARRAR, DIRECTOR, THE WELLCOME TRUST: Yes, there has been a global response, the sharing of information originally from China but now, around the world of the data, the epidemiology, what is happening to this virus. There has been a global response in that way. But what there hasn’t been yet and what we need is how are we going to get out of this pandemic now? And how are we going to make sure that it doesn’t come back in the future? Because at the moment, the probability, the possibility of the second and third waves is very high. After we go through this first crisis, we may face the crisis in the future. And the only long- term exit from that is going to be to develop the drugs that we need to treat people and save lives. And also, critically, the development of vaccines that are going to be needed to make sure we can prevent this happening in the future. And that is about science, it is about development, it is also about the manufacturing and the distribution of those vaccines so that everybody in the world can benefit from that science. And at the moment, we don’t have that global coming together of the scientific endeavor that puts aside nation states, puts aside where it would be made and where it would manufactured, and say we need this for the whole world and we need to make sure nobody is left behind. Now, the W.H.O. needs to be at the heart of that, the European Commission, a leading extensive work to try to bring countries together. A number of countries already very generous in terms of supporting, but we do need more. And businesses, which are so badly affected by this, as George Osborne was just saying, also need an exit strategy and the best exit strategy for all of us is that we have treatment of vaccines that could get around and prevent future pandemics.