Meaty First Caller - "Indian variant" B1617 - transcript of Mike Cashman on BBC Radio 4 Any Answers 15 May 2021

 

Anita  Anand (00:00):

Let’s start with the news of the Indian variant, the announcement that we've got to go carefully at five o'clock yesterday, Michael Cashman. You're our first caller on this. What did you make of it all?

Mike Cashman  (00:11):

Hallo there Anita, I wish that people who spoke about this on the radio understood the maths. We've had both the prime minister and Niall Ferguson saying it's relatively small numbers - and the Prime Minister actually saying, if we saw exponential growth, then we would have to do something about it. We are seeing exponential growth, now. It's tripling each week is what we've seen, Now the government is wrong to block surge vaccination in Blackburn, Bolton, and so on, because that could have a real impact. And you know, I've heard people say, “Oh well, but the vaccine takes three weeks to take effect”; Anita I'll give you a statistic. If it's tripling every week, then in five weeks, it multiplies by 240 times. What you could do with vaccinating, now, that vaccination taking effect in three weeks, it's going to reduce what happens later by a factor of 240. You could surge vaccinate, Blackburn, Bolton, Bedford and make a massive difference. The fourth test, the government's fourth test -  variants of concern not changing assessments - that test is failed as Sam Coates of Sky News said and the government has, they said at the start, we're going to be driven by data, not by dates, but now they're being driven by dates. You know, Nicola Sturgeon has said, let's pause for a week. That would be a sensible thing to do. We don’t know…

Anita  (01:42):

This is an awful lot of information. And it sounds as if this comes from something that, you know, something about, is this your business, Michael Cashman? What do you do?

Mike   (01:51):

Oh, okay. I’m retired or retired into writing, but I was accountable for 25 million pounds of UK Aid for eradicating Ebola in Sierra Leone. Anita, I can tell you one thing about every piece of work that I did in various countries in Africa and elsewhere, the UK government always insisted on a focus on outcomes. You know, we wouldn't talk about anything, unless you were clear about what outcome you were attempting to achieve, and that has been completely thrown out of the window for the UK response,

Anita  (02:28):

Can I come, can we just unpack some of the things that you've said? So, first of all, I mean, you've talked about the exponential growth. So we are, that growth, we are in it already is

Mike   

It’s happening, yes. Small numbers, but they will get much bigger

Anita  

The vaccinations – sure, so the argument that was put forward at the five o'clock briefing yesterday against doing surge vaccinations in areas that are experiencing higher rates than others, was that if you give a vaccine here, others will not get that same vaccine. The supply is finite. Is there no sympathy with that at all?

Mike   (03:00):

Let’s give a simple analogy. Anita, suppose that you've got a dam, and water building up behind it. And you've been working on the basis of saying, let's build up this dam. Let's strengthen this dam wherever we can. Now, if it suddenly starts to show some leaks, what you should do is then focus on the area where the leaks are - to plug them.  rather than saying, well, let's carry on with our strategy because we said, what we're going to do is work everywhere.

Anita  (03:26):

…is reinforce the dam. Okay. All right. Okay. So, I mean, that's a very simple and very visual analogy that you've created. Let me put this to you. We are in a different position, we're hearing some epidemiologists saying to that we were in a year ago and that we have a large proportion of the most vulnerable who are vaccinated. Therefore, if there were to be a surge through the general population, people would get ill, hospitals would be put under stress, but we would not have the same kind of consequences that we are seeing in India, and that we saw this time last year.

Mike   (04:00):

Well, I certainly hope that we don't see the same situation in India, but it would be great if we had helped further there and sequenced the genome when it's actually out there or help them to sequence the genome rather than waiting until it arrives in this country. But what we've got in terms of vaccination at the moment is I think 19 million fully vaccinated, 17 million part vaccinated - that leaves almost half of the UK population unprotected now,

Anita  (04:29):

But younger people, younger people who we are told do not suffer the consequences as harshly, as older and more vulnerable people,

Mike   (04:36):

Statistically overall, that's true. And the effect of a third wave, like the second wave we saw, which had tens of thousands of deaths earlier this year, the effects hopefully would not be so great. So it might be just thousands of deaths and people with long COVID, but isn't that worth trying to avoid by being driven by data, not by dates?

Anita  (05:03):

Okay. This is the last one, because we've got so many people who want to talk about this, but I just, just one other question to you. If it were in your gift, what would you say? Look, next Monday, a lot of people have made plans and many, many more have made even bigger plans for June. Would you say, “Look Monday’s off and June didn't even think about it right now”.

Mike   (05:22):

I'd say “Pause for a week. It’s what  Nicola sturgeon is doing that, that’s sensible. Assess the data. Things are changing all the time, but surge vaccinate, a million people in Blackburn, Bolton, Bedford, and other areas; act now because that will potentially make a difference".

Anita  (05:38):

Thank you very much, indeed. A really meaty first caller on there.