1 00:00:03,830 --> 00:00:07,670 Okay. Can you just start by saying your name and what your current position is? 2 00:00:08,330 --> 00:00:14,180 Yes, my name is Klaus Killer and I'm an assistant professor of the history of medicine at University College Dublin. 3 00:00:15,020 --> 00:00:20,390 And what was your previous connection with the Oxford Vaccine Group before going to Dublin? 4 00:00:20,420 --> 00:00:27,050 I started my post on January 1st, 2020. I was a member of the Oxford Martin School as well. 5 00:00:27,080 --> 00:00:31,310 I was a member of the program on collective responsibility for infectious disease. 6 00:00:32,700 --> 00:00:43,109 Okay. And so just to kind of warm you up, can you tell me how you first got interested in history or in general or history of medicine in particular, 7 00:00:43,110 --> 00:00:48,360 and what have been the main dating posts on your career up to the point where you came to Oxford? 8 00:00:48,870 --> 00:00:52,370 It's been quite a a long, binding history, I have to say. 9 00:00:52,380 --> 00:00:59,400 So I started off studying ancient history and medieval history, and I did that in Munich, in Germany, 10 00:00:59,400 --> 00:01:04,290 and got increasingly interested in the role of the environment in shaping past societies. 11 00:01:04,650 --> 00:01:10,229 And while I was studying in Munich, they founded a new it's called the Rachel Carson Institute for the Study of the Environment. 12 00:01:10,230 --> 00:01:16,500 And I was fortunate enough to to get a paid a research assistant post there and kind of got sucked 13 00:01:16,500 --> 00:01:21,240 increasingly into the contemporary period working for another historian called Frank Uchitel. 14 00:01:21,600 --> 00:01:26,190 And that that kind of grounded my interest in the environment more broadly. 15 00:01:26,490 --> 00:01:33,629 And while researching the environment, I had to start picking faeces topic for myself and antibiotics seemed to be a 16 00:01:33,630 --> 00:01:37,170 great way of combining this interest in how human culture shaped the environment, 17 00:01:37,170 --> 00:01:40,820 but also in turn shaped by the environment. So that got me into antibiotics. 18 00:01:40,830 --> 00:01:45,930 I was fortunate enough to be able to study at the University of Chicago, do a master's there, 19 00:01:45,930 --> 00:01:54,239 and after coming back from Chicago, wanted to continue within the English speaking area of research. 20 00:01:54,240 --> 00:02:01,950 So my my wife and I were again fortunate enough to get a post in Oxford, and because of work and funding, 21 00:02:01,950 --> 00:02:08,159 I transitioned from being an environmental historian to to becoming a historian of medicine with a very strong focus on the 22 00:02:08,160 --> 00:02:16,590 environment and did my dissertation research on the history of antimicrobials anti-regulation with a strong focus on food regulation, 23 00:02:16,590 --> 00:02:24,899 food production. So a lot of your work, I mean, more and more, it seems recently is very policy orientated, 24 00:02:24,900 --> 00:02:31,920 orientated and it's almost social policy research rather than history. 25 00:02:32,100 --> 00:02:39,390 So what, what, how do you see a long perspective as being important in examining these issues? 26 00:02:40,080 --> 00:02:44,879 I think a long perspective is absolutely crucial for all issues within the field of policy. 27 00:02:44,880 --> 00:02:48,209 And to be honest, the boundaries between policy and history often blur. 28 00:02:48,210 --> 00:02:53,640 I mean, every historian lives in the present and we are shaped by the things that surround us, 29 00:02:53,640 --> 00:02:59,850 by the events we witnessed in terms of how we then witness and and perceive long term past dependencies in the past. 30 00:02:59,860 --> 00:03:06,419 So thinking about the coronavirus pandemic, I think that all history of medicine would be written differently after COVID. 31 00:03:06,420 --> 00:03:11,159 I don't think there's a there's a way to transplant your brain to to prior moments of time. 32 00:03:11,160 --> 00:03:18,210 So I think my work is still very much anchored in myself, working as a historian and looking through long term trends. 33 00:03:18,570 --> 00:03:28,140 But I'm quite explicit about where I stand within the policy arena and also try to to bring this long term view into policy. 34 00:03:28,500 --> 00:03:36,270 And that's, I think, perhaps a result of of having this poster up the Oxford Martin School, where it was all about answering grand challenges. 35 00:03:36,270 --> 00:03:39,900 So climate change, antimicrobial resistance, vaccine hesitancy. 36 00:03:40,230 --> 00:03:46,860 And in each of these areas, history and the long term trends, the structural determinants shaping specific usage patterns, 37 00:03:46,860 --> 00:03:54,720 the cultural fears, the inequalities that are anchored, they all shape the field of possible actions in the present. 38 00:03:55,050 --> 00:04:02,610 And I think historians have historically been been a bit too reluctant to engage with the present. 39 00:04:02,610 --> 00:04:07,620 The present is very messy, right? You know, it hasn't been distilled down to a set of deposited sources yet, 40 00:04:08,760 --> 00:04:15,149 but at the same time the present is continuously drawing on history and meaning making to shape political action going forward. 41 00:04:15,150 --> 00:04:20,670 So in many ways, a historian is can can serve as a kind of guide into the long term. 42 00:04:20,970 --> 00:04:25,770 Doesn't mean I have a particularly better view on the future than anybody else in the room. 43 00:04:25,770 --> 00:04:29,850 But I think it's sometimes there is an advantage of seeing the structural path 44 00:04:29,940 --> 00:04:34,500 dependencies play out in a certain decision setting and highlighting alternatives. 45 00:04:35,620 --> 00:04:39,279 That's a very good, very good explanation. And what about the methods that you use? 46 00:04:39,280 --> 00:04:46,690 Because, I mean, clearly, if you were if you're looking at medieval history, you're dependent on a rather thin collection of paper sources, 47 00:04:47,410 --> 00:04:51,580 but working very strongly in the present, you've got more available to you. 48 00:04:52,070 --> 00:04:54,790 What what what methods do you mainly rely on? 49 00:04:55,360 --> 00:05:04,239 What I really enjoyed when I was doing medieval history was the incredible transformation the field was going through in parallel to archaeology too. 50 00:05:04,240 --> 00:05:12,370 With the advent of genomics, with the advent of better scientific ways of understanding wider environments, 51 00:05:12,370 --> 00:05:18,450 and also the application of ethnographic methods to the past, to understand, for example, ritual modes of communication and sources. 52 00:05:18,460 --> 00:05:23,470 So I think actually viscosity of sources make medieval historians very creative, 53 00:05:23,710 --> 00:05:27,760 but also very sophisticated in engaging with the knowledge of other disciplines in terms of just 54 00:05:27,760 --> 00:05:34,060 anchoring how people were interacting with the non-human factors around them and moving to the present. 55 00:05:34,090 --> 00:05:37,540 That's obviously very useful to employ to in the present. 56 00:05:37,540 --> 00:05:41,049 However, you have a different church, which is often too many sources, right? 57 00:05:41,050 --> 00:05:49,090 We're surrounded by an incredible wealth of information that's also been deposited in the archives since the 19th 20th century. 58 00:05:49,090 --> 00:05:57,219 Really. And so for me, the challenge was always about combining a way of navigating through these this wealth of sources in the present, 59 00:05:57,220 --> 00:06:00,520 while not losing this medieval focus on context and the environments. 60 00:06:01,720 --> 00:06:05,860 So the methods I employ are always a mix. 61 00:06:06,220 --> 00:06:10,670 I'm very interested in meaning making by different groups of people. 62 00:06:10,700 --> 00:06:16,149 So I focussed a lot of my research using sociological methods developed by a German sociologist 63 00:06:16,150 --> 00:06:23,770 called Respect to understand how people conceive of risk and how common fears shape societal action, 64 00:06:23,770 --> 00:06:26,800 create groups within society into two distinct forms of distribution. 65 00:06:27,700 --> 00:06:33,339 And you can do that with lots of digital humanities methods. So you can do mass analysis, analysis of source databases. 66 00:06:33,340 --> 00:06:36,820 You can also do very detailed readings of individual sources or policy documents. 67 00:06:37,180 --> 00:06:42,850 But I'm also at the same time very interested in how these risks are shaped by very real 68 00:06:42,850 --> 00:06:48,160 environmental shifts that I can also pin down with environmental evidence or microbial evidence. 69 00:06:48,170 --> 00:06:55,960 And I'm not a microbiologist myself, but I work a lot with with microbiologists, with environmental scientists, 70 00:06:56,350 --> 00:07:01,600 and thinking and talking very openly with them about some of the structural constraints we see with trying 71 00:07:01,600 --> 00:07:08,829 to establish frameworks that integrate these two ways of of forces when it comes to analysing our past, 72 00:07:08,830 --> 00:07:17,390 but also the national past. Hmm. I think I was also getting at the fact that there are witnesses still around who you can. 73 00:07:17,540 --> 00:07:21,759 Yes. Yes, that's that's absolutely true. 74 00:07:21,760 --> 00:07:26,580 And I mean, in many ways I'm becoming a witness myself by participating in this oral history interview. 75 00:07:26,590 --> 00:07:33,370 So that's the other part of the research. So it's you know, I still see myself as a classic historian in many ways, 76 00:07:33,730 --> 00:07:40,510 but I obviously also draw on lots of the great knowledge specifically that many of the witnesses have. 77 00:07:41,200 --> 00:07:49,270 So to give you an example, for one of the books that I've written on the history of animal welfare politics in the UK, 78 00:07:49,600 --> 00:07:52,569 I drew a lots on interviews with senior scientists, 79 00:07:52,570 --> 00:08:00,640 what's involved in policy circles, but also some of the activists who had encountered the prime activists in my book, Ruth Harrison. 80 00:08:00,910 --> 00:08:09,190 And it wasn't really so much about verifying individual facts or, you know, trying to get a complete record of history, 81 00:08:09,490 --> 00:08:17,590 but it was more to see how these people understood their own role and how they understood the internal dynamics of the field developing. 82 00:08:17,860 --> 00:08:24,129 So that's also a very useful source of information for historians that we often don't get in the quite formalistic sources, 83 00:08:24,130 --> 00:08:27,130 specifically in the policy area that are deposited in the archives. 84 00:08:27,670 --> 00:08:30,160 MM Well, let's arrive at Kovac now. 85 00:08:30,370 --> 00:08:36,250 Can you remember where you were when you first heard that there was something going on that was a respiratory outbreak 86 00:08:36,830 --> 00:08:44,140 in China and how soon it was before you realised that it was something that was going to be affecting the world? 87 00:08:44,710 --> 00:08:52,270 I think it wasn't the first couple of days of January when these tweets started coming around, which is a great source of information for myself. 88 00:08:52,570 --> 00:08:57,820 When you follow the right people, you do get pinged about lots of very interesting things that are going on. 89 00:08:57,820 --> 00:09:06,940 And so I think I was in Germany with my family for Christmas and I saw a tweet saying, oh, this this sounds ominous. 90 00:09:06,940 --> 00:09:11,890 Mysterious respiratory outbreak in China. And I continued following this. 91 00:09:13,330 --> 00:09:19,560 Soon afterwards, I went to North America for a conference, and at that point, it was already very clear that there was something going on. 92 00:09:19,570 --> 00:09:27,219 The first people were wearing masks. And then I was you know, I flew out to to a typhoid conference in Dhaka, in Bangladesh, 93 00:09:27,220 --> 00:09:34,810 with all of the public health establishment of the UK, Germany, which was with that scheme in which this was. 94 00:09:35,810 --> 00:09:39,320 I would have to look up the date. I think this was late. This was early February. 95 00:09:39,320 --> 00:09:45,770 I think so going forward. And what was really remarkable at this conference was that lots of these very 96 00:09:45,770 --> 00:09:49,639 high profile people who were involved in the vaccine response and the lockdowns, 97 00:09:49,640 --> 00:09:54,200 etc., going out, they started disappearing from one breakfast to the next. 98 00:09:54,200 --> 00:10:02,020 So something was clearly happening. There was a clear mood of emerging concern of people there. 99 00:10:02,030 --> 00:10:09,200 You also saw participants started to mask up. I think, you know, they were very aware of what was happening and it started appearing. 100 00:10:09,530 --> 00:10:13,399 This was before. So that became very, very common in the public at home. 101 00:10:13,400 --> 00:10:22,040 So when I came back to Oxford, where I was living at that point, I told my family, you know, we should probably something's coming. 102 00:10:22,040 --> 00:10:31,820 We should probably stock up on at least some some kind of, you know, basic things for for the Labour case in case we get sick and can't go out. 103 00:10:32,690 --> 00:10:38,930 And I went down to Liverpool for another talk and infectious diseases and on the way back I stopped behind, somebody was coughing a lot, 104 00:10:39,650 --> 00:10:45,260 is clearly unwell and the next day I came down well, not the next day, but two days later I came down with quite a high fever. 105 00:10:45,260 --> 00:10:49,010 My daughter also came down with quite a high fever. I don't know what it was. 106 00:10:49,100 --> 00:10:55,820 It could have just been the flu, but from that point on, we first voluntarily locked ourselves away and then the lockdowns were announced. 107 00:10:56,420 --> 00:11:05,780 Mm hmm. And. And at what point were you asked to become involved in documenting the work of the vaccine group? 108 00:11:06,470 --> 00:11:15,290 It was a very fluid process. I'd been contacted as part of the Martin School Group, also as part of the Oxford Vaccine Group. 109 00:11:15,500 --> 00:11:19,610 I was a voluntary and an honorary vaccine historian. 110 00:11:19,610 --> 00:11:27,349 I think that's my title on the website. I'd been media requests were being filled that to me about journalists who wanted to have a longer 111 00:11:27,350 --> 00:11:31,669 term view of the history of vaccine development and the history of infectious disease control. 112 00:11:31,670 --> 00:11:40,729 And so was it we need to get. So you're association with the vaccine group group proceeded they okay. 113 00:11:40,730 --> 00:11:42,160 I didn't understand that. Yes. Yes. 114 00:11:42,170 --> 00:11:48,650 So so we have a how that came about within the within the Oxford Martin School programme that I was part of as a postdoc. 115 00:11:49,370 --> 00:11:55,010 There were multiple groups there. So one was led by Angela McLain, who is now the UK's chief scientific officer. 116 00:11:55,700 --> 00:12:01,340 The other one was headed by Andy Pollard, who played a big role in the testing of the coronavirus vaccine, 117 00:12:01,640 --> 00:12:04,840 and the historians group was headed by Mark Harrison, my time, 118 00:12:04,850 --> 00:12:09,229 also my doctoral supervisor at what was then the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine. 119 00:12:09,230 --> 00:12:13,250 And, you know, we'd been discussing all of these challenges. 120 00:12:13,250 --> 00:12:17,720 We had lots of debates and vaccine hesitancy, designed exhibitions and tie for control. 121 00:12:18,170 --> 00:12:26,059 And I think I was just the historian that people knew in this this group Constellation and that negotiated, 122 00:12:26,060 --> 00:12:30,290 as you know what I was starting my new post tablet to keep those some of those old 123 00:12:30,290 --> 00:12:36,439 affiliations I'd been assigned the title of of this historian of the vaccine group. 124 00:12:36,440 --> 00:12:40,970 And we started again filling these media requests. 125 00:12:42,230 --> 00:12:46,190 I featured in one of the Netflix documentaries on Corona Virus. 126 00:12:46,190 --> 00:12:49,370 Race to the Vaccine was really just about providing context, 127 00:12:50,090 --> 00:12:56,090 longer term context about how we could think about these vaccine rollouts and vaccine hesitancy in longer time frames. 128 00:12:57,050 --> 00:13:04,700 But the more we were providing history for for other people, the more we became aware that obviously lots of exciting things. 129 00:13:04,700 --> 00:13:12,079 What's happening within Oxford during this time. So Samantha found a slots my colleague within the Oxford Vaccine Group and myself, 130 00:13:12,080 --> 00:13:18,680 we started thinking of of creating a time capsule of interviews just while this crisis was ongoing, 131 00:13:18,680 --> 00:13:24,499 just regular chats to people about where they came from biographically, but also how they perceived different challenges. 132 00:13:24,500 --> 00:13:28,460 And we started creating a series of oral history interviews. 133 00:13:29,060 --> 00:13:36,890 Do you remember when that when that was when you started? Yes, I think we started formally doing this in early 2021. 134 00:13:37,160 --> 00:13:47,750 All right. So so, you know, right after the kind of big rollouts were starting, but we were having these informal discussions earlier on. 135 00:13:47,870 --> 00:13:54,229 And we'd also been contacted by a team of lawyers by this point to also think 136 00:13:54,230 --> 00:14:00,139 through some of the ethical and legal challenges of trialling of human trials, 137 00:14:00,140 --> 00:14:07,940 trials which were a big topic at the start and also vaccine adverse effects with already been chatting with them earlier about, 138 00:14:07,940 --> 00:14:14,000 you know, the lack of of a UK framework that had been updated to to compensate adequately for adverse effects. 139 00:14:14,390 --> 00:14:18,950 And we published a policy brief in October 2020, I believe, 140 00:14:18,950 --> 00:14:29,299 on the need for some kind of special scheme to be created for COVID to just deny oxygen for vaccine hesitancy going forward, 141 00:14:29,300 --> 00:14:34,880 but also really helping people who had done the right thing but suffered adverse effects while while doing. 142 00:14:34,940 --> 00:14:38,060 The right thing going forward. And unfortunately, that wasn't implemented. 143 00:14:38,390 --> 00:14:43,820 But as a result of this also, it led to a lot more press interest and also interest, 144 00:14:44,030 --> 00:14:47,810 academic interest in how these schemes could be optimised going forward. 145 00:14:49,330 --> 00:14:54,340 So, yes, I interrupted you. You were just saying you decided to collect oral history interviews. 146 00:14:54,340 --> 00:14:57,810 So they were. I'm just coming to understand how all this worked, 147 00:14:57,820 --> 00:15:05,980 because I think I had a sense of you almost embedded within the group and watching events as they unfolded. 148 00:15:05,990 --> 00:15:15,010 But if you didn't start till 2021, then you were getting a retrospective view from them of what had happened since. 149 00:15:15,400 --> 00:15:21,920 Well, January really, I think, was when the first when they first made the construct that was going to be the basis of. 150 00:15:21,940 --> 00:15:28,260 Absolutely. I mean, we'd been obviously kept in the loop and we attended the virtual lab meetings going forward. 151 00:15:28,270 --> 00:15:34,030 But again, we were historians and social scientists and this was a time of of biosecurity confinement. 152 00:15:34,030 --> 00:15:44,290 So there was a know, I think it would have been pretty unethical for us to break some of the lockdown restrictions to to go into these sites and, 153 00:15:44,290 --> 00:15:51,639 you know, to oh, indeed, when I said embedded, I didn't mean within the rules about both. 154 00:15:51,640 --> 00:15:55,570 So obviously neither of us is is a trained microbiological research. 155 00:15:55,570 --> 00:16:01,660 So there was also a little point of us going in there and and see obviously lots of these discussions, 156 00:16:01,660 --> 00:16:09,950 specifically the discussions about the vaccine race. I mean, we were hearing lots of things, but it was it was quite a loaded atmosphere. 157 00:16:10,000 --> 00:16:13,989 So with Brexit happening, you know, discussions about Brexit allocation happening at that point. 158 00:16:13,990 --> 00:16:20,469 So I think it would have been difficult to conduct interviews in that setting. 159 00:16:20,470 --> 00:16:24,670 There were also concerns about security in Oxford. We had to do all of the work virtually right. 160 00:16:24,670 --> 00:16:32,230 So all of these things were circling around. So I think that's that's where the formal start of the project really happened in early 2021. 161 00:16:33,490 --> 00:16:37,389 And I think you were quite careful about setting up the ethics and the security 162 00:16:37,390 --> 00:16:41,980 and possibly to a greater extent than than I have been on this project with that. 163 00:16:42,310 --> 00:16:44,950 So what hoops did you have to jump through? 164 00:16:45,700 --> 00:16:53,860 Well, we had to go for ethics clearance because while all of the people we were interviewing were quite senior, 165 00:16:54,010 --> 00:16:57,399 that they were perfectly articulate, they were masters in giving media interviews. 166 00:16:57,400 --> 00:17:03,490 At this point, we were asking them to reflect quite candidly on their experience, 167 00:17:04,510 --> 00:17:09,220 and we were also obviously asking them to reflect about broader time timescales. 168 00:17:10,270 --> 00:17:13,480 COVID is what is is obviously the big pandemic of our time. 169 00:17:13,810 --> 00:17:19,990 Many of them had also been involved in the Ebola response earlier, and there were a lot of tensions, 170 00:17:19,990 --> 00:17:24,459 I think, about that rollout still in the historical memory of the recent historical memory. 171 00:17:24,460 --> 00:17:32,380 So everybody had to have the opportunity to speak openly to us, but also didn't have the opportunity of saying, 172 00:17:32,380 --> 00:17:39,430 I don't want this published, I want this banned for so on so many years before it's released, etc. 173 00:17:39,760 --> 00:17:43,180 And we were you know, there was a context that we were interviewing. 174 00:17:43,180 --> 00:17:54,819 So we really wanted to be very diligent that we weren't unintentionally exposing anybody to to negative effects down that downstream. 175 00:17:54,820 --> 00:17:59,320 We we were also very intent on saying that we weren't journalists, we weren't looking for any smoking gun. 176 00:17:59,830 --> 00:18:05,649 We were really interested in the context of how these decisions were not just coming down the road in 2020, 177 00:18:05,650 --> 00:18:14,140 but have actually been pre shaped by 10 to 20 years of structural changes in the UK vaccine industry and vaccine research before that. 178 00:18:15,330 --> 00:18:20,090 And how willing were the members of the group and when we. 179 00:18:21,120 --> 00:18:26,970 I've used the phrase the Oxford Vaccine Group, but there were two groups here when there was the Oxford Vaccine Group and there was the Jenner, 180 00:18:27,390 --> 00:18:34,290 and the whole vaccine project involved people from both both of those units. 181 00:18:35,370 --> 00:18:40,859 And so you were you were talking to people across the board, across those two two units. 182 00:18:40,860 --> 00:18:46,110 And I think my question was, how enthusiastic were they about about the project? 183 00:18:47,390 --> 00:18:52,129 I think throughout all of my time working with with researchers in the biomedical sciences, 184 00:18:52,130 --> 00:18:56,100 I've always been struck how open they are and how interest that they are in social sciences. 185 00:18:56,110 --> 00:18:59,420 So it's a very, very open group. They're very self-reflective. 186 00:18:59,660 --> 00:19:04,310 There was a great sense that this was an important, a useful project. 187 00:19:04,970 --> 00:19:09,260 We obviously started with what we knew, you know, and who we knew. 188 00:19:09,920 --> 00:19:15,380 So we started initially actually working with Richard Moxon, initially the founder of the Oxford Vaccine Group, 189 00:19:15,650 --> 00:19:21,920 and Andy Pollard, whom we both knew quite well who was the head, and this the head of of the Oxford Vaccine Group. 190 00:19:21,920 --> 00:19:28,220 But that then quickly became enmeshed with also looking at people within the institutes, 191 00:19:28,730 --> 00:19:34,790 obviously involved in designing the vaccine, making many of the big commercialisation decisions or commercialisation decisions. 192 00:19:34,800 --> 00:19:40,040 And we were also really interested in the people, you know, 193 00:19:40,040 --> 00:19:47,570 in that the people who were absolutely essential in running the trials in, you know, vaccine nurses, 194 00:19:48,080 --> 00:19:52,129 the administrators within these units who just, you know, 195 00:19:52,130 --> 00:20:00,950 overnight had to deal with an international emergency with with the resources of a university academic post which which lots. 196 00:20:01,700 --> 00:20:08,839 So that was a very it was a very natural it was a very fluid networking experience. 197 00:20:08,840 --> 00:20:15,280 We talked to some people. They said we should talk to other people. And I think everybody we asked ended up saying, yes. 198 00:20:15,290 --> 00:20:21,500 I mean, sometimes we have to take time to just explain. The project explained, you know, the security level stuff we would put in place. 199 00:20:22,820 --> 00:20:27,560 But again, I think everybody quickly realised that we were not out there to get anyone. 200 00:20:27,860 --> 00:20:29,960 We were just interested in understanding the situation. 201 00:20:31,950 --> 00:20:40,420 And roughly how long did you interview them each for and got interested in the nuts and bolts that you did this with? 202 00:20:40,440 --> 00:20:45,270 And did you tend to did each interviewee just have one session or did you go back to them for more than one session? 203 00:20:45,770 --> 00:20:52,530 For for some people we had ten sessions. Oh, like it was it was because neither of us were paid to do this. 204 00:20:52,980 --> 00:21:00,180 Neither of us had, you know, we didn't have to go through the standard grant writing process of, you know, calculating our hours. 205 00:21:00,180 --> 00:21:09,600 This this was really pure research for us. We said it'll take as long as it takes and also as long as people are willing to talk to us. 206 00:21:09,600 --> 00:21:17,429 I mean, they're also very busy people. But I think with Andy, I think we have a series of interviews over essentially all of 2021, 207 00:21:17,430 --> 00:21:21,450 which was a very interesting year for perspectives to evolve with. 208 00:21:21,450 --> 00:21:28,350 Richard. We did interviews also, I think for for close to 12 months of of interviewing, 209 00:21:28,770 --> 00:21:32,010 and it was very rich and we could just come back to things said earlier. 210 00:21:32,640 --> 00:21:34,710 It was it was very rewarding process. 211 00:21:35,100 --> 00:21:44,400 I don't think I'd ever get a grant application through with with this with this work, which was very you know, it was it evolved. 212 00:21:44,900 --> 00:21:51,630 I mean, it wasn't planned completely. And how many people did you do all together in the end, or is it still going on? 213 00:21:52,020 --> 00:21:59,240 I think I think we finished now. I would have to go to our list of people to say how many we've actually interviewed at the end. 214 00:21:59,250 --> 00:22:05,459 Is that a very rich corpus? Now again, because we we didn't formally apply for funding, we have to code all of these things ourselves. 215 00:22:05,460 --> 00:22:08,670 So it's in addition to the standard job. 216 00:22:08,680 --> 00:22:13,409 So it's taking a bit longer than we fostered, but we have a very rich collection, 217 00:22:13,410 --> 00:22:18,629 I think, of all spheres of within the China Institute and within obviously, 218 00:22:18,630 --> 00:22:26,790 but also further afield, people who are involved in MHRA decision making at this time of of just interviews covering the field. 219 00:22:26,800 --> 00:22:30,780 So the, the idea is to make this available. 220 00:22:31,590 --> 00:22:33,870 Hopefully by the end of this year, everything will be out. 221 00:22:33,870 --> 00:22:41,430 Everything will be published within the constraints of the ethics agreements, obviously, just as as they stand. 222 00:22:41,910 --> 00:22:45,620 Or will there be any sort of contextual work around them? 223 00:22:45,630 --> 00:22:48,330 We obviously so I'm clearly a historian, 224 00:22:48,330 --> 00:22:56,850 so I'm very interested in linking this to some of my research on research infrastructures in the UK for biomedicine since the 1990s. 225 00:22:56,850 --> 00:22:59,250 I think there's a lot to be unpacked here, 226 00:22:59,580 --> 00:23:06,270 a lot to understand with all of the great knowledge about who was making which decisions, how agencies were interacting, etc. 227 00:23:06,270 --> 00:23:09,360 So that is is very clearly the goal here. 228 00:23:09,360 --> 00:23:14,099 Once it's released, the release itself will also be a contextual database. 229 00:23:14,100 --> 00:23:22,919 So rather than I think doing what, as is often the case in oral history, where it's essentially a data dump, you collect all of the states, 230 00:23:22,920 --> 00:23:29,940 it's dumped onto website and the website isn't maintained and nobody listens to 20 hours of interviews ever again. 231 00:23:30,090 --> 00:23:36,149 And it's a very detailed research project. We want to index it and make it searchable by keyword terms, etc., 232 00:23:36,150 --> 00:23:45,030 so that we create value also going forward so that this is a corpus of interviews rather than just, you know, 20 hours of people talking. 233 00:23:46,310 --> 00:23:52,420 Hmm. Yes. I'm rather jealous of that, because I think my interview was at the moment of it, 234 00:23:52,440 --> 00:23:59,280 are in the form of a simply a a set of recordings which are going up on the university podcast. 235 00:23:59,520 --> 00:24:07,040 I think. I think. I think that's great. Also with the university podcast, and I think that's a great way of communicating directly to the public. 236 00:24:07,050 --> 00:24:15,090 But I think for a historian, I've I've worked a lot with oral history interviews that other people have also done in the past, 237 00:24:15,090 --> 00:24:18,959 and it's always been very productive for me to not only have the transcript, 238 00:24:18,960 --> 00:24:25,260 but really to be able to see the kind of interconnections that the neural network 239 00:24:25,260 --> 00:24:28,440 of the people who were doing the interviews and why they selected certain people, 240 00:24:28,440 --> 00:24:36,149 how certain themes emerged, etc. So we really just want to experiment again because we don't have a grant that's dictating when we have to publish, 241 00:24:36,150 --> 00:24:41,639 when we have to get things done to really experiment this into this well and have 242 00:24:41,640 --> 00:24:45,730 something that is meaningful for future researchers will also be analysing us. 243 00:24:45,750 --> 00:24:48,750 I guess you know how we do these things. Yes. 244 00:24:48,900 --> 00:24:54,720 Yes. And I mean, have you had you must, although you haven't had time to analyse it properly, 245 00:24:55,730 --> 00:25:01,500 what do you think the main themes are that have emerged that you'd like to explore in more detail? 246 00:25:02,920 --> 00:25:11,650 I think the big theme that has emerged was how much can 2020 had been pre framed by what happened five years earlier during Ebola 247 00:25:13,300 --> 00:25:23,800 and how much that technological development between 2010 and 2015 predetermined what we then saw as vaccine generations coming out. 248 00:25:25,180 --> 00:25:28,450 I mean, there are obviously other very interesting themes running through these interviews, 249 00:25:28,450 --> 00:25:33,310 such as how British researchers see their place within the world of vaccine research in general, 250 00:25:33,370 --> 00:25:36,460 that Britain doesn't have a large vaccine manufacturing capability, 251 00:25:37,060 --> 00:25:44,350 hadn't really invested a huge amount in vaccine innovation during the 1990s, was starting to do it again. 252 00:25:44,740 --> 00:25:46,750 Brexit obviously also runs through this. 253 00:25:46,750 --> 00:25:54,280 So this re-evaluation of where do we stand, what our relations with our European colleagues, those things run through that. 254 00:25:54,280 --> 00:26:00,849 But I think the biggest interesting thing for me really is how a biographically, 255 00:26:00,850 --> 00:26:10,450 a very distinct cohort of vaccine researchers emerged in the UK in the 1980s, 1990s, all shaped by education experiences in North America. 256 00:26:11,580 --> 00:26:23,550 Be how this translates into the need to redesign UK vaccine policy as a result of the sell off of big industry and the transition of industry abroad. 257 00:26:23,940 --> 00:26:29,999 And then see how Oxford, as a distinct cluster, a very effective cluster of research centres, 258 00:26:30,000 --> 00:26:35,490 evolves to really dominate part of the UK vaccine response in 2020. 259 00:26:35,520 --> 00:26:43,499 Obviously none of this happened overnight and so it's really I think these interviews allow you to to reconstruct how Oxford, 260 00:26:43,500 --> 00:26:46,590 as a vaccine centre, as a vaccine hub emerged, 261 00:26:46,590 --> 00:26:55,950 but also how the UK's position in the world of biomedical research and innovation changed over the last 40 years and continues to change because, 262 00:26:55,950 --> 00:27:00,330 I mean, I know that you've you've made a policy commentary, 263 00:27:00,600 --> 00:27:08,100 but publish such a commentary on the decision to sell off the Vaccine Manufacturing Innovation Centre, 264 00:27:08,100 --> 00:27:14,440 the V Mic, which was presumably sited near Oxford for the very reasons that you described. 265 00:27:14,480 --> 00:27:20,820 You wanted to talk about that little bit. Yes, I mean, the policy commentary was very much a surprise. 266 00:27:21,090 --> 00:27:29,069 We'd studied the V mic quite closely ahead of of the decisions to sell it off being announced because we thought it 267 00:27:29,070 --> 00:27:37,620 was a great model for non-emergency innovation outside of pandemic situations that could be applied to other areas, 268 00:27:37,620 --> 00:27:39,930 such as, for example, antimicrobial innovation. 269 00:27:40,260 --> 00:27:50,100 And the beautiful thing about the remake was that it was designed to both create critical upscaled capacity for vaccine production to allow very small 270 00:27:50,100 --> 00:27:53,909 manufacturing capacities at research centres to be upskill for phase one face 271 00:27:53,910 --> 00:27:58,890 to face free trials before handing them over to industry during emergencies. 272 00:27:59,040 --> 00:28:04,859 But it would also act as an incubator for all of this very rich biotech scene that has emerged 273 00:28:04,860 --> 00:28:12,060 around the UK's leading universities to use these facilities to to create commercial products, 274 00:28:12,720 --> 00:28:17,160 monoclonal antibodies, vaccine technology, I mean, you name it going forward. 275 00:28:17,460 --> 00:28:25,710 And we thought that this could also be applied to other areas which suffer from market constraints, such as antimicrobial innovation, 276 00:28:25,710 --> 00:28:30,420 where you just have a research infrastructure in place that is publicly supported but just 277 00:28:30,420 --> 00:28:35,250 provides this critical ramp up capacity beyond the standard commercial value of death. 278 00:28:35,820 --> 00:28:42,270 So we were very surprised when the sell off was announced and decided to write a 279 00:28:42,270 --> 00:28:47,910 commentary challenging the rationale behind it from what we were given to understand. 280 00:28:49,260 --> 00:28:55,469 I should say here that we weren't given to understand this at all by people within the vaccine group, the Oxford Vaccine Group, or the Gen Institute. 281 00:28:55,470 --> 00:28:57,480 This was information we had from separate sources. 282 00:28:58,140 --> 00:29:06,090 The decision seems to have been made as a result of attempts to save costs following the pandemic rollout in all areas of government, 283 00:29:06,090 --> 00:29:09,150 and that this was seen as low hanging fruit, which could just be ruled out. 284 00:29:10,590 --> 00:29:16,200 But we thought it was a mistake because the V mic and this this focus on 285 00:29:16,200 --> 00:29:20,400 preparedness that could also be integrated into capacity building more broadly 286 00:29:20,700 --> 00:29:30,150 was such a cornerstone of what this this new scene of research that had emerged in the UK around vaccines since 2000 had really been lobbying for. 287 00:29:30,170 --> 00:29:36,780 So selling it off right after it had actually proved its worth during the initial pandemic response made no sense whatsoever to us. 288 00:29:37,590 --> 00:29:41,040 It's now been sold off, unfortunately, I think. 289 00:29:41,760 --> 00:29:48,780 But it was that this piece was really about querying this decision from a long term perspective, 290 00:29:48,780 --> 00:29:53,939 where the next pandemic will inevitably hit at some point and where it is important to have 291 00:29:53,940 --> 00:30:00,450 a critical care capacity in place that doesn't necessarily follow commercial determinants. 292 00:30:00,450 --> 00:30:04,140 Industry is not always the best at getting the next health rights, 293 00:30:04,590 --> 00:30:10,079 especially when there's not a lot of money involved in investing in the next threat that may be around the corner. 294 00:30:10,080 --> 00:30:15,960 Whereas academia can do this. And if you create this infrastructure of upskilling, that's a very important national asset to have. 295 00:30:15,970 --> 00:30:20,190 So that was really what this piece was about. Mm hmm. 296 00:30:20,490 --> 00:30:24,389 And you talked about the variety of people that you interviewed. 297 00:30:24,390 --> 00:30:30,360 I think that's something that struck me very much is that the success of the project depended very much 298 00:30:30,720 --> 00:30:37,500 on people with a very wide range of skills and know no one individual could possibly have done or, 299 00:30:37,540 --> 00:30:43,500 you know, even if you cloned one person, they couldn't have done it. You had to have this very wide range of skills. 300 00:30:43,720 --> 00:30:46,950 Was that something that that struck you as well when you were talking to them? 301 00:30:47,610 --> 00:30:52,500 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you talk to historians, colleagues of mine, they'll know better. 302 00:30:52,620 --> 00:31:00,630 I'm not a big fan of the Alexander Fleming myth that's grown up around penicillin and I think completely misleads, you know, 303 00:31:01,560 --> 00:31:08,160 lots of people who don't have a have an active stake in biomedical innovation to think of these moments of genius and, 304 00:31:08,160 --> 00:31:12,840 you know, heroic individual, usually white men in lab coats making big scientific breakthroughs. 305 00:31:12,840 --> 00:31:21,090 I mean, no big breakthrough in biomedicine in the 20th or 21st century as the result of heroic individuals. 306 00:31:21,390 --> 00:31:31,230 It's always the result of big science, big science, public big science, albeit private big science, but big science, which as a 10 to 20 year horizon. 307 00:31:31,920 --> 00:31:40,860 The vaccine technologies we're using now, they were sort of in the 1990s, in the early 2000s, you know, the first experiments started. 308 00:31:41,490 --> 00:31:45,209 And so these that was very clear from the beginning. 309 00:31:45,210 --> 00:31:52,200 It didn't come as a huge surprise to to myself or to Sam, because I think we've just been working this area for so long. 310 00:31:52,500 --> 00:31:57,630 That was a big goal of this interview. Project was capturing this infrastructure of development. 311 00:31:57,930 --> 00:32:04,950 Mm hmm. And did you encounter any kind of anxiety about credit across the team, about, 312 00:32:05,520 --> 00:32:08,850 you know, who would and wouldn't be recognised for the work that they'd done? 313 00:32:10,280 --> 00:32:11,240 No, no. 314 00:32:11,300 --> 00:32:19,340 I honestly have to say, in 2021, when we were doing these interviews, it was really about, you know, the I mean, they've been working to the bone. 315 00:32:19,940 --> 00:32:27,360 That entire team to get this over the line that obviously you had the adverse effects report coming out of North America. 316 00:32:27,380 --> 00:32:31,400 They've had the vaccine distribution concerns going forward. 317 00:32:31,400 --> 00:32:38,540 And I think at that point, everybody was really just very focussed, to be honest. 318 00:32:38,660 --> 00:32:46,010 We also want that interested in that question. I think it was something that obviously got repeatedly raised in the press. 319 00:32:47,080 --> 00:32:54,640 But considering what we really thought this was a story about, namely a story about investments 20 to 30 years ago, 320 00:32:54,910 --> 00:33:01,710 starting to manifest in a very specific way that never really was a big interest of ours. 321 00:33:01,720 --> 00:33:09,640 I mean, we got lots of anecdotes about personal and institutional rivalries dating back to the 1980s, playing out in some contexts. 322 00:33:09,640 --> 00:33:21,310 But none of this was was, I think, at the floor of our interviewees minds when they were speaking to us about how things were going in 2020 21. 323 00:33:22,390 --> 00:33:28,150 Yeah, I think if I could popped into my mind because of what you said about the Alexander Fleming complex. 324 00:33:28,620 --> 00:33:35,019 I guess really, if you, you know, if you ask anybody who developed the Oxford vaccine, everybody would say Sarah Gilbert. 325 00:33:35,020 --> 00:33:42,610 And she's got a Barbie doll. And, you know, she's she she had the focus has been very much on her. 326 00:33:43,270 --> 00:33:48,760 And that's that's purely a media phenomenon, really, that they like to have one person to focus on. 327 00:33:49,660 --> 00:34:00,580 And and so her role has been falsely, I think, exaggerated, possibly at the expense of the other team members. 328 00:34:01,590 --> 00:34:10,200 I think, Sara Gilbert. His health may not always have been very comfortable with with this eye that was put on her. 329 00:34:11,540 --> 00:34:18,680 I think that in general, the team, as we witnessed it, it was the mission focus was really extraordinary on on delivering. 330 00:34:19,160 --> 00:34:22,670 But it was also very clear that it could only ever be a team focus. 331 00:34:22,670 --> 00:34:30,290 Right. I mean, they had to go through extraordinary sacrifices in terms of manning the lab, you know, staffing the lab, I should say. 332 00:34:30,290 --> 00:34:41,599 And in terms of, you know, just all of the international attention being put on to them during a very intensive personal time of their lives, 333 00:34:41,600 --> 00:34:44,840 obviously, they were also all at risk of contracting the infection. 334 00:34:45,320 --> 00:34:51,709 So that never struck me. I think in retrospect, it is something I think that historians have to get better at. 335 00:34:51,710 --> 00:34:54,860 But also I think science journalists really have to get better at. Is that. 336 00:34:57,320 --> 00:35:01,190 The need to tell a good story shouldn't Trump. 337 00:35:02,390 --> 00:35:07,060 The necessity to tell an accurate story or to have an accurate reflection of what's going on. 338 00:35:07,060 --> 00:35:16,450 That because I think as as a result of that, it allows the public also to quickly lose sight of things that need to be put in place or maintained. 339 00:35:16,480 --> 00:35:23,440 Now, in preparation for the next event, I mean, we see the reports about H5N1 going around at the moment. 340 00:35:24,490 --> 00:35:33,850 We need we need not only surveillance, we need not only vaccine manufacturing capability, we need the networks to be in place. 341 00:35:33,850 --> 00:35:45,139 And we need to have. But the personal continuity of expertise guaranteed to enable a successful response to the next pandemic going forward. 342 00:35:45,140 --> 00:35:49,310 And we don't know what it could be. You know, it doesn't have to be influence. It could be something completely different. 343 00:35:49,310 --> 00:35:52,340 This is what Andy Pollard has also always been emphasising, 344 00:35:52,580 --> 00:35:59,870 is that we got lucky with SARS-CoV-2 because coronaviruses have been the subject of intensive research going forward. 345 00:36:01,010 --> 00:36:06,560 So I think that is the narrative that urgently needs to be preserved and that's what we really hope to do with these interviews. 346 00:36:08,330 --> 00:36:13,790 So coming back to your, your own career, you your when did your post in Dublin officially start? 347 00:36:14,360 --> 00:36:20,239 January 1st, 2020. So Oh, I see. That's so true. 348 00:36:20,240 --> 00:36:26,660 And I think two times I the first time I still and then I reopened the door in. 349 00:36:27,760 --> 00:36:36,280 They 2021. So it was almost like re-entering a time capsule in that office with some drawings from my daughter when she was very small, stood there. 350 00:36:36,290 --> 00:36:39,740 So yeah, it was it was also a very interesting time arriving in Dublin. 351 00:36:40,150 --> 00:36:43,600 Also, it's sort of the Brexit flora that was happening during that time. 352 00:36:43,960 --> 00:36:46,840 So yeah, as a person of the question, a tense time. 353 00:36:48,710 --> 00:36:57,410 And I think, yes, given the time, I'll start on this, but no, no, I'll do the I'll do the rest of this first. 354 00:36:57,410 --> 00:37:02,420 So what what is your main area of research interest at the moment. 355 00:37:02,420 --> 00:37:06,080 What are you working on now. So it's a multitude of projects. 356 00:37:06,560 --> 00:37:12,170 I've come to characterise myself as a historian of bugs and drugs, so I started off doing antimicrobials. 357 00:37:12,170 --> 00:37:17,630 I started off really focusing on drug regulation that turned into a focus on drug innovation, 358 00:37:18,020 --> 00:37:20,719 tended to focus on infectious disease control and surveillance. 359 00:37:20,720 --> 00:37:27,590 And my post in Dublin at the moment was that the post was created by a Wellcome Trust University award, 360 00:37:27,590 --> 00:37:32,540 which which centred on the rise of one of the first gold standards for infectious disease surveillance globally, 361 00:37:32,840 --> 00:37:35,569 which is the use of bacteriophage or bacteriophage type. 362 00:37:35,570 --> 00:37:42,209 And the way you use a set of bacteria infecting viruses to reliably characterise certain bacteria below the species level. 363 00:37:42,210 --> 00:37:48,080 And that formed the basis for the global surveillance networks that we still see in action nowadays. 364 00:37:48,710 --> 00:37:56,090 And the idea is once again as to a long term history of this, to really understand how did this technology rise before the Cold War politics of it, 365 00:37:56,090 --> 00:38:04,459 but B, really, how is it continuing to shape our knowledge of microbial diversity and infectious disease threats nowadays, 366 00:38:04,460 --> 00:38:14,300 including the incredible inequity in surveillance capabilities that often see biosecurity of the in the US prioritised in terms of funding, 367 00:38:14,300 --> 00:38:19,250 in terms of surveillance, 4k above any attempt to control endemic diseases in the global South. 368 00:38:20,690 --> 00:38:25,250 Which presumably is to a certain extent self-defeating because folks don't recognise boundaries. 369 00:38:26,000 --> 00:38:29,450 That is. This is the argument. Exactly. Yes, yes, yes, yes. 370 00:38:29,990 --> 00:38:35,870 And going back to the current bias itself, how how threatened did you feel personally? 371 00:38:36,380 --> 00:38:44,060 I mean, you had this infection in February which could well have been exposed, but subsequently, did you did you feel that you were yourself at risk? 372 00:38:45,350 --> 00:38:51,530 So I obviously didn't know what I had. So who who knew what that was? 373 00:38:52,780 --> 00:39:01,160 B, We were expecting a second child during that time, so we were very cautious during during all of 2020, 374 00:39:01,880 --> 00:39:06,230 including, you know, having to go to hospitals for these appointments. 375 00:39:06,560 --> 00:39:11,780 You know, the best, as was the father waiting outside in the car for all of these things. 376 00:39:11,780 --> 00:39:17,720 So I think that that very much shaped our personal view of of risks, etc. 377 00:39:18,890 --> 00:39:22,400 I think personally, for me, it's really only been. 378 00:39:23,440 --> 00:39:28,059 This year, really that that the guard has started to come down to a greater extent. 379 00:39:28,060 --> 00:39:33,310 And I think that's looking at people around the streets, around and looking at people on international flights. 380 00:39:33,310 --> 00:39:36,880 That seems to have been the experience for the majority of of the public to. 381 00:39:37,510 --> 00:39:46,810 Mm hmm. And what was your what were your work circumstances like at home with one and then two small children? 382 00:39:47,050 --> 00:39:58,390 And how did you how did you cope with that? Yeah, you know, I think we coped, you know, we, I think we, we developed the motto of following follow it. 383 00:39:58,540 --> 00:40:02,780 You know, nothing was perfect. We just had to manage and, and, and, and get get on. 384 00:40:02,800 --> 00:40:07,990 You know, there was, there was very little else you could do and Yeah. 385 00:40:07,990 --> 00:40:15,940 So, so it was, it was obviously not ideal in quite small Oxford accommodation with with two very young children. 386 00:40:16,960 --> 00:40:22,570 But it was also very intense and very rewarding time in terms of just being able to spend it with your family. 387 00:40:22,570 --> 00:40:27,010 I think that's what you appreciate after the effect. You know, if you ask me to fast 20, I think. 388 00:40:28,160 --> 00:40:33,350 Frustration at a lack of infrastructure support, etc., might have been at the fall of my mind, but I think in retrospect, 389 00:40:34,310 --> 00:40:42,890 I think the pandemic for many people has highlighted the value of the broader context of life surrounding them. 390 00:40:44,530 --> 00:40:57,430 And and to what extent did the the the work that you did on the on the COVID vaccine as looking on that as part of your professional development? 391 00:40:58,420 --> 00:40:59,829 I know it sounds a terrible thing to say, 392 00:40:59,830 --> 00:41:07,000 but do you value that period as a as something that broadened your understanding of the field or interesting interested in? 393 00:41:07,900 --> 00:41:08,650 I think definitely. 394 00:41:08,650 --> 00:41:17,500 I think it was a period of very, very intense thinking about how different aspects of my work relate to each other before going into the pandemic. 395 00:41:17,650 --> 00:41:20,020 I just looked this up on my on my CV, 396 00:41:20,020 --> 00:41:27,579 and actually I wrote a tiny blog I think that only two people have ever read for for Show Me in Ireland in July 2020. 397 00:41:27,580 --> 00:41:34,959 And it's it was that actually oh, all of these things I've been working on and to relate my work on antimicrobials asthma, 398 00:41:34,960 --> 00:41:45,160 infection control relates to the work of vaccines and how infectious disease research has been neglected for such a long time in high income areas. 399 00:41:45,490 --> 00:41:54,190 And it also relates to the to to to the extreme inequalities about of of access to global health infrastructures, 400 00:41:54,190 --> 00:42:00,520 but also the extreme selective focus of the global health networks we've put in place for preparedness. 401 00:42:01,720 --> 00:42:07,030 And it relates to my policy work, which had become a bit more pronounced running up to the pandemic. 402 00:42:07,030 --> 00:42:11,680 But I think after going through the pandemic, there was also the realisation that. 403 00:42:12,790 --> 00:42:19,969 You know, I. I don't think. You history historians have a privileged perspective on it, 404 00:42:19,970 --> 00:42:24,440 but the voice needed to be heard because everybody started recounting histories and 405 00:42:24,620 --> 00:42:29,900 mobilising history to justify specific forms of intervention or specific exceptionalism, 406 00:42:30,320 --> 00:42:34,070 and that there was a need for history to be present and active in this space. 407 00:42:35,660 --> 00:42:40,910 And that's only going to go on with the inquiry that's underway and that kind of thing. 408 00:42:40,910 --> 00:42:45,080 So has your policy work led directly to. 409 00:42:47,300 --> 00:42:47,660 I mean, 410 00:42:47,660 --> 00:42:59,060 are you have you been called upon to advise public policy areas or is it so far a matter of writing pieces in the BMJ or The Lancet or whatever, 411 00:42:59,070 --> 00:43:05,750 and making sure the voice is out there? So it has been called upon in. 412 00:43:07,070 --> 00:43:13,190 I mean, how should I say? So it's you know, the work itself has been cited in some of the policy reports that have come out, which is great. 413 00:43:13,460 --> 00:43:20,420 I do principally see myself as an academic and as a story, and I'm not a policymaker, but it's been very rewarding to see articles, 414 00:43:20,420 --> 00:43:32,720 for example, on the structure and limits of change within UK surveillance capability cited in the infectious blood products reports in the. 415 00:43:32,860 --> 00:43:39,649 And you know, with regards to antimicrobial innovation, I think also there's there's been developments in that area. 416 00:43:39,650 --> 00:43:50,870 So it's nice to see people approach me, you know, how far my opinions actually end up shaping anything that comes out in the actual final policy room. 417 00:43:50,870 --> 00:43:59,480 I don't know. But I think. Academically in terms of media visibility, but also in terms of policy visibility. 418 00:43:59,870 --> 00:44:11,779 Clearly, something's changed since 2020, and you obviously have a unique perspective as a historian in that you don't have an axe to grind in 419 00:44:11,780 --> 00:44:17,780 the way that because quite often people who are involved in biomedical research make policy comments, 420 00:44:17,780 --> 00:44:22,309 but they you could see that they had an interest in pursuing a particular line. 421 00:44:22,310 --> 00:44:26,750 But as you mentioned earlier, the historian has the wider and longer perspective. 422 00:44:27,080 --> 00:44:33,940 I mean, we also all have interests, right? I'm still I've I've been associated in a certain political milieu. 423 00:44:34,490 --> 00:44:41,030 I hold certain values. I think what I can be is I can be explicit about some of this. 424 00:44:42,050 --> 00:44:49,700 But in other areas I can also explicitly say that I'm agnostic about outcomes, but I want to be transparent about past dependencies going into it. 425 00:44:53,610 --> 00:44:57,950 I think it's pretty much. Oh, yes. 426 00:44:57,960 --> 00:45:05,910 Well, I'll ask you this question. How do you think future historians will frame the global response to the COVID pandemic? 427 00:45:07,310 --> 00:45:17,840 I think that's the wonderful thing about history. You never really know what kind of broader trend you're witnessing without completely understanding 428 00:45:18,380 --> 00:45:23,750 all of the huge forces and all of the contingencies that are interacting in one specific moment. 429 00:45:24,230 --> 00:45:32,330 I think what we'll see for sure over the next decade or so is that COVID has reshaped the world of global health. 430 00:45:32,900 --> 00:45:37,160 I think it hasn't broken the biosecurity mould of dealing with global health. 431 00:45:37,430 --> 00:45:44,180 Despite all of the hopes for increased access, despite all of the rhetoric in 2020 and all of these things, 432 00:45:44,180 --> 00:45:47,690 what we see when we see about the numbers of people who've got access, 433 00:45:48,530 --> 00:45:57,740 the defence of intellectual property, and I think to a great extent control over capabilities, of access of capabilities. 434 00:45:58,130 --> 00:46:08,960 We see that COVID has accelerated pre-existing tendencies within global health, which weren't necessarily good for for wider groups of people. 435 00:46:09,590 --> 00:46:14,060 But I think also what we've seen is just the rise of new actors in the space. 436 00:46:15,260 --> 00:46:21,080 I mean, in the West, we think about the AstraZeneca vaccine, we think about the RNA vaccines, etc. 437 00:46:22,010 --> 00:46:30,260 But if we think about which access vaccines first reach large parts of the global population, we see very different actors coming out. 438 00:46:30,290 --> 00:46:35,770 I mean, Russia and Ukraine, obviously nowadays that's also again shifted the geopolitical equation there. 439 00:46:35,780 --> 00:46:44,840 But the role of China, the role of India is something that I think future historians will shape and focus on much, much in to a much greater extent. 440 00:46:44,850 --> 00:46:46,100 We see it in antimicrobials. 441 00:46:46,310 --> 00:46:54,260 China manufactures 80% of active pharmaceutical ingredients for for all of the global antimicrobials nowadays, and that is only going to increase. 442 00:46:54,830 --> 00:47:02,180 Also in the field of vaccinations. So we may be too myopic to see it in the current commentaries we see in the West. 443 00:47:02,690 --> 00:47:11,610 But I think what COVID has shown us is the limits of what systems we put in place in the 1990s with the hope of trickle down and, 444 00:47:11,630 --> 00:47:17,720 you know, lots of rhetoric, but actually that the capacity building can achieve when it comes to the big global health challenges. 445 00:47:18,050 --> 00:47:21,190 Mm hmm. And what about preparedness? 446 00:47:21,200 --> 00:47:31,429 I mean, I think there was a hope that both locally and nationally, a lesson would be learned about the need to be prepared. 447 00:47:31,430 --> 00:47:38,690 But I've certainly heard in the past year or so quite cynical views about how there's a sense 448 00:47:38,690 --> 00:47:44,659 that the caravan has moved on and we're not putting enough thought into the next pandemic, 449 00:47:44,660 --> 00:47:47,810 which everybody agrees will be here in 5 to 10 years. 450 00:47:50,210 --> 00:47:57,980 It's very difficult to answer that. I think it's obviously right not to just focus on pandemics, but also on the climate emergency, 451 00:47:58,190 --> 00:48:06,140 which is is the accelerator of the pandemics is a huge accelerator of global injustice, but is obviously a result of the injustice itself. 452 00:48:06,590 --> 00:48:15,800 So I think it is right to to to leave the emergency and completely biosecurity mode of policymaking that we've inhabited for a very long time. 453 00:48:17,420 --> 00:48:21,489 However. The infrastructure that we've put in place so far. 454 00:48:21,490 --> 00:48:30,910 I mean, we're the new all pandemic hub. Would it actually be able to prevent SARS-CoV-2 from spreading if we had exactly the same outbreak nowadays? 455 00:48:31,540 --> 00:48:34,569 I doubt it. I mean, perhaps perhaps we could have had early information, 456 00:48:34,570 --> 00:48:38,649 but that the politics we saw play out and we still see playing out with the lab leak theory. 457 00:48:38,650 --> 00:48:45,580 And, you know, all of these these these these politically very loaded debates about origins, 458 00:48:46,000 --> 00:48:54,040 I think they're very ill suited to actually stopping diseases from not from emerging only, but also from spreading once they've emerged. 459 00:48:54,050 --> 00:49:04,780 And I think we need to if I had a hope for the future, it would be that we perhaps move away from the only stamp out and control, 460 00:49:04,780 --> 00:49:10,330 you know, the boots on the ground, parachuting people in to stamp out a disease outbreak mode of the pandemic narrative, 461 00:49:10,630 --> 00:49:17,590 but really focus on what was actually the big cause of death during SARS-CoV-2, and that was reduced access to health care, 462 00:49:17,620 --> 00:49:22,209 not enough access to social care, not quick enough rollout of the vaccines to where they were needed. 463 00:49:22,210 --> 00:49:25,450 So the second, the much more important stage of the pandemic, you know, 464 00:49:25,450 --> 00:49:32,109 once once the floodgates have broken, once we've been seeded with infection, that is is the crucial story. 465 00:49:32,110 --> 00:49:39,639 And I to be honest and this is this is a doctor. I don't think we've done anything to to to to improve that stage. 466 00:49:39,640 --> 00:49:43,180 I mean, where are the extra beds, isolation facilities? 467 00:49:43,690 --> 00:49:49,899 Where are the social care networks? I don't see them at the moment. 468 00:49:49,900 --> 00:49:54,400 And I think that is is a crucial mistake. Mm hmm. 469 00:49:54,850 --> 00:50:01,509 And I think this is the final one. What's your experience of working through the pandemic changed your attitude or your 470 00:50:01,510 --> 00:50:06,900 approach to your own work and all the things that you'd like to see change in the future, 471 00:50:06,910 --> 00:50:08,170 apart from what you've just mentioned? 472 00:50:09,250 --> 00:50:16,360 I think the entire discipline of history has been, to a certain extent, changed by it, by this experience of of collective crisis. 473 00:50:16,660 --> 00:50:21,940 I mean, historians are always fascinated about generational experiences and how they shape perspectives going forward. 474 00:50:22,570 --> 00:50:28,750 And this was a global event that every single person on the globe witnessed experience in different ways. 475 00:50:28,750 --> 00:50:31,210 But it was the same event, right? 476 00:50:31,570 --> 00:50:38,410 So I think historians before long have studied this event, but we've also all been changed by it, by how we go forward. 477 00:50:38,710 --> 00:50:41,830 What I really see now in lots of the histories in other fields, 478 00:50:41,830 --> 00:50:47,290 which previously perhaps didn't pay too much attention to disease crisis, ecological collapse, 479 00:50:47,290 --> 00:50:52,149 is that I think there has been a very big sensitisation in many other parts of 480 00:50:52,150 --> 00:50:55,930 the field for all of these various things that are encapsulated in the pandemic, 481 00:50:55,930 --> 00:51:03,640 also the emotional experience of crisis. Once again, we are you know, historians are never neutral, but we're inherently embedded. 482 00:51:04,510 --> 00:51:11,580 And I think this reflectiveness about what this experience meant for us in terms of what we can see in sources going back, 483 00:51:11,590 --> 00:51:15,410 that's that's a very big thing. Okay. 484 00:51:15,980 --> 00:51:17,060 Thank you very much.