It looks like we may finally be getting a coronavirus vaccine. But who’s “we”? Who is at the front of the queue, and who should be at the front of the queue? Should it be those with the greatest need or the highest bidder? In the second of the series, Tim Harford talks to GP Margaret McCartney, health economist Professor Philip Clarke and biological engineer Dr Anna Blakney. Contact us: vaccine@bbc.co.uk ..read more

For the final instalment of this series we are turning over the programme to you, our listeners. Over the past four months we’ve asked you to send us your questions, and you have obliged. But we haven’t always managed to reciprocate by answering them. In this episode, Tim Harford talks with a panel of experts who will try to answer as many questions as we can fit into a half an hour. Guests include Professor Beate Kampmann from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Professor Melinda Mills of Oxford University, and the GP Dr Helen Salisbury. Producers: Sandra Kanthal and Beth Saga ..read more

Way back in the distant past that was last November, we rushed to produce the first episode of How To Vaccinate The World. Those were heady days. Pfizer and BioNTech seemed to be able to produce a stunningly effective vaccine using a brand new technology faster than we could learn how to pronounce BioNTech. Ever since then the vaccines, and the headlines about vaccines, have kept coming. So in the penultimate programme in the series, Tim Harford asks Rasmus Bech Hansen,CEO of Airfinity, Natasha Loder Health Policy Editor of the Economist and Dr Paul Offit Director of the Vaccine Education Cent ..read more

Tim Harford is an economist not an immunologist, so he's on solid ground with this week’s programme which is all about numbers. Some of them are small but significant: 7 reported cases of cerebral venous thrombosis in Germany. Others are huge: 400 million doses of Covid 19 vaccine administered around the world. Then there are the numbers that we’d love to know but don’t - about the effectiveness of a single dose, or whether we are getting closer to herd immunity. We find out what the numbers can tell us about Covid 19 vaccinations with this week's panel of guests: Professor Sheena Cruickshank ..read more

More than 300 million doses of Covid 19 vaccines have been administered - that’s nearly three times the number of official Covid cases. But, the novelist William Gibson once said: the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed and that’s certainly true for Covid 19 vaccines. Some countries are the haves, and others the have nots. So, where do we go from here if we are going to bring this pandemic to an end? That's the question Tim Harford asks this week's panel of guests: Gian Gandhi of UNICEF, Hannah Kuchler from the Financial Times and Prashant Yadav from Center for Global ..read more

In the UK alone, more than 20 million people have had a first dose of a Covid 19 vaccine, and the government hopes to speed up the roll out by offering every adult a first dose by the end of July. But the word “offering” may be doing a lot of work in that sentence. Not everyone is taking up that offer - and there is a lot of talk about lower take-up rates of people in who are not both British and white - sometimes lumped together with the acronym BAME - Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic. In this week's How To Vaccinate The World, Tim Harford ask what is behind this trend, and what can be done t ..read more

Monopoly is a good parallel for life in a pandemic because it deals out suffering at random, and it seems to go on forever. So people can be forgiven for asking: where’s our Get Out of Jail Free card? The answer might be vaccination passports. Or, it might not; the possibility of unintended consequences looms large. This week on How To vaccinate The World, Tim Harford will be asking if we need or want vaccine passports, and what problems they are trying to solve with his guests: Simon Calder, Travel Editor of The Independent, Professor Carsten Maple of the University of Warwick and Professor M ..read more

Vaccines and Variants is a great title for a fun new geeky game but a very bad combination for public health. New variants of the virus which causes Covid 19 are turning up in countries all over the world. Can the vaccines we have keep up with them, or do years of booster jabs await us? Tim Harford answers these questions with this week's panel of guests: Professor Peter Hotez of the Baylor College of Medicine, Professor Emma Thomson of the University of Glasgow and Dr Adam Kucharski of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Producer: Sandra Kanthal Listener questions can be sent ..read more

Monopoly is a good parallel for life in a pandemic because it deals out suffering at random, and it seems to go on forever. So people can be forgiven for asking: where’s our Get Out of Jail Free card? The answer might be vaccination passports. Or, it might not; the possibility of unintended consequences looms large. This week on How To vaccinate The World, Tim Harford will be asking if we need or want vaccine passports, and what problems they are trying to solve with his guests: Simon Calder, Travel Editor of The Independent, Professor Carsten Maple of the University of Warwick and Professor M ..read more

In the UK alone, more than 20 million people have had a first dose of a Covid 19 vaccine, and the government hopes to speed up the roll out by offering every adult a first dose by the end of July. But the word “offering” may be doing a lot of work in that sentence. Not everyone is taking up that offer - and there is a lot of talk about lower take-up rates of people in who are not both British and white - sometimes lumped together with the acronym BAME - Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic. In this week's How To Vaccinate The World, Tim Harford ask what is behind this trend, and what can be done t ..read more