7 lessons from the Covid crisis with Sir Patrick Vallance
What can our approach to tackling the Covid pandemic teach us about how we should address the climate crisis?
In this first episode, we ask how innovation can be catalysed in the face of an urgent, global problem. It normally takes over a decade to create a vaccine, but during the Covid-19 pandemic, multiple vaccines were available in a matter of months. How did this remarkable achievement happen?
In this episode, Nina and Simon are joined by Sir Patrick Vallance, former Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government, to discuss the seven lessons we should learn from the Covid crisis about how to create the right conditions for urgent innovation to prevent dangerous climate change.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to Net Zero. What's innovation got to do with it? A podcast series focusing on one of the greatest challenges facing the world today how to decarbonise our economies at breakneck speed to reach net zero and the role of a critical ingredient in addressing that challenge. Innovation. I'm Simon Retallick, And I'm Nina Foster. And together we lead the Carbon Trust Net Zero Intelligence Unit, a new independent research team that works to identify and share workable solutions to accelerate progress towards net zero.
::Innovation is all about addressing existing needs or challenges in new ways. And when it comes to the climate crisis, that means the cutting edge and transformational changes that will power the net zero transition. We'll be talking to committed innovators about their work in reducing costs, reaching hard to decarbonise areas, and opening up new opportunities for transformations across energy buildings, transport and food systems.
::Before we look at the innovations we need for net zero, we're going to take a step back and look at how innovation was catalysed in the face of another urgent global problem. During the COVID 19 pandemic, the world clearly managed to create and deploy vaccines at an unprecedented pace, saving hundreds of thousands of lives and enabling the global economy to reopen.
::And we think this experience might be able to teach us something about the way we could tackle climate change. So in our first episode, we're thrilled to be joined by Sir Patrick Vallance. Sir Patrick was instrumental in helping drive the innovation required for the UK to respond effectively to the COVID pandemic, including developing and rolling out COVID 19 vaccines.
::He was also chair of the UK's Net zero Innovation Board and chief scientific adviser to COP26 and is now chair of the Natural History Museum. Sir Patrick, welcome. I discovered earlier this week that we went to the same school in Cornwall. How did you get from Truro School to chief scientific adviser to the UK government? Ah, well, I.
::I left for a school and went to medical school. So I went to medical school at St George's Medical School, which then part of the University of London. And after qualifying, I quite quickly realised I wanted to do research as well. So I ended up with a sort of academic clinical career leading a research group and then moved to UCL as professor of medicine.
::I then took a sort of complete change and went into industry for 11 years where I tried to make some medicines in GlaxoSmithKline and was head of Global head of R&D. And after that I decided that I wanted to broaden beyond just thinking about biomedical things. And so that's why I applied to be the government chief scientific adviser.
::And little did you know that time that you would end up being that chief scientific adviser at the time of a global pandemic. Well, I went there imagining I would broaden beyond biomedicine and ended up, of course, spending two and a half years pretty much doing nothing but biomedical things. And in what was the worst pandemic for a century?
::Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's fantastic to have you here to reflect on what lessons you can share from that experience of driving innovation in handling the COVID pandemic for addressing the climate crisis, both in terms of what worked well and perhaps what could have gone better. But before we dive in, many of our UK listeners will, of course remember seeing you on our TV screens, sometimes on a nightly basis during the pandemic.
::The pressure to come up with solutions at speed and scale must have been really intense. What was that like? Well, it was inevitably a very pressurised period and we were dealing with partial information most of the time. And so the challenge as a science adviser is to take the information you've got and try to distil that into advice for the decision makers in a way that also allows them to understand what the uncertainties are.
::And there are always uncertainties. And those uncertainties shouldn't stop decision making, but it's important to be aware of them and what might happen that would reduce those uncertainties. So that really was the challenge because there was a dearth of data, in many cases a dearth of information, and it was important to try and get what there was into shape that ministers and others could understand.
::And clearly there are parallels with with the climate crisis to some extent around that educational role and around the science. Well, one of the things that's really important about science is it's very often perceived by those who aren't in science as an absolute. You know, it's just going to tell you the truth, full stop. Whereas of course, what it ultimately is the process of learning that is self-correcting.
::You have a hypothesis, you test it, you either confirm it or not, you disrupt that and say, No, it's not like that. And science corrects itself. And of course, the same is true in climate. I mean, we're learning all the time and trying to understand what are the things that most make a difference. Where can we make most impact?
::And we shouldn't ever get in, fall into the trap of presenting things in absolutes because that ultimately, of course, will not be true and therefore undermines the whole area on climate. We know that to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial temperatures, the world needs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at an impressive dented rate. And that rapid innovation could play a key part in our ability to do that.
::Innovation was critical to the success of the development and rollout of the COVID 19 vaccines from innovative types of vaccines such as the M, R and a vaccine to the huge programmes of public vaccination. What do you think reflecting back with the key factors driving those kinds of innovations? Well, I mean, there's always a sort of an urgent need is a great driver for innovation.
::And in this case there was a very urgent need. And the challenge that we put down to the vaccines taskforce is get vaccines for the population by the end of the year. So a very clear time bound, specific objective. We didn't know it was possible and at the beginning it was quite likely you couldn't do that, but it shouldn't stop you really pushing.
::And of course the ultimate answer was you could do that. That then requires a number of things to happen to make it successful. And one of the key things is I think there are parallels here with what we need to do around our approach to climate change is you need single point, accountable leadership. You need the ability to drive things quickly.
::You need to have a very clear objective which people can see and buy into and understand what the parameters of that are. You also need experts. These problems are not non-specific policy issues. They are very technical very often. And so bringing in and in the case of climate net zero, bringing in engineers is going to be incredibly important to these things.
::So there are a series of lessons that I think we learned from the Vaccines Taskforce, which I've spoken about previously, and I've just listed some of them, and there's to me there are sort of seven key lessons that I think we can apply to other areas. Actually, thinking back to the COVID experience, what was the most challenging aspects of the development and rollout of the vaccine in the UK from your perspective?
::Well, I mean, ultimately the initial challenge was nobody had ever made one before. I mean, you had no idea whether this was possible. And there were lots of concerns at the beginning that this might not be possible. Or indeed, there are cases where you make a vaccine and it makes things worse, not better, so that there were things that people were genuinely worried about.
::The good news was there was a starting point. People had already worked on things like this. The great news was there was new technologies which made all this much faster than had ever been before. But it needed a very coordinated response across the world to understand what the landscape of all the possibilities were, how those then could be prioritised in some ways, and the bringing together of an approach that looked at research and development, manufacturing, procurement and policy was very, very important.
::So it was an integrated approach to this, which I think helped to try and get this in the right place, and also created a degree of confidence from industry where a lot of this was going to come from. They, they could see that this was being done in a way that took into account the various components and therefore they had a degree of assurance that if they came up with something, there was a proper way to actually test it, understand whether it was useful, how it would be used and a potential procurement pool for them as well.
::Clearly, there was such a sense of urgency during the pandemic and you know, in many ways the same should be said about the climate crisis. So on timing, it normally takes several years to a decade to create a vaccine. And yet obviously in the UK we had one in a matter of months. What steps did you take to facilitate that really urgent response to developing a new vaccine?
::If you look historically, it takes at least a decade to make a vaccine and very often you can't make them. So that that was the starting point. There were things that had happened technically and messenger RNA is one of them, and viral vector vaccines and other, which meant it ought to be quicker. No one knew how quick it could be.
::What happened was I think the entire biomedical community came together to try and make sure that this was a priority. And the bringing together of regulators, manufacturers, engineers, research and development people to make sure that where things could be done in parallel, they would be done in parallel. And very often in these processes, you're doing it in sequence that you do one thing and the next thing, and then the one after that was a risk prone appetite.
::But because of the urgent situation to do things in parallel and to condense that timeline, and I think there are really important lessons that for how we think about tackling climate, it, we can't take a normal approach. We have to take some risk. You have to take a portfolio risk on innovations because you don't know which one's going to work.
::So one of the key things in the vaccines was we didn't start by saying we know exactly which one's going to win. We're back. That one. We backed a portfolio approach and Kate Bingham was terrific at, you know, doing that and making sure that we knew which ones might make it. Which things along the way would tell us whether they were likely to make it or not make it.
::So you could then begin to put more into those that looked more promising or were more manufacturable or something that made them just have that little edge so you could adjust as you went along. But fundamentally, it was a portfolio approach that was important. I believe the same is going to be true for how we think about technologies for net zero.
:: the aim to get to net zero by: :: e. So when you work back from: ::So I think by working back, you realise that you've got to have a series of things in place now. You need to be clear what your go no go decisions on each of those are and you need to be clear by when you need to make that decision. And that, in my opinion, should really be the target of the near-term funding.
:: And most of what we need by: :: establishing what we need for: ::Do you find it frustrating that the climate crisis doesn't seem to have elicited the same sense of urgency as there clearly was during the pandemic? Well, I think it is different. I mean, you know, there was an immediate problem with people suffering and dying around the world, and it was very urgent to get on with that within the period of a year.
:: when we think about net zero: :: nce of getting to net zero by: ::Yeah, just picking up a little bit on on what you said about how there was this clear sense of urgency in the pandemic because there was very tangible, immediate consequences and for climate change, it's quite different. I mean, in the past couple of years, we're seeing really tangible consequences in terms of droughts, wildfires. Do you think that really seeing those lived impacts of climate change might stimulate some of the urgency that we saw in the pandemic?
::Well, they should do, and we know that there are many things that are very abnormal. Some of the weather patterns are extremely abnormal. We know that the melting, for example, of or the weather around the Antarctic Peninsula is extraordinary. And it's the fastest warming place in the southern hemisphere. We know that there are potential tipping points which people have looked at, which caused considerable concern.
::So there are enough signals. And I think the things that people can now understand are real, that that does create a sense of urgency. But then there's also a sense of, well, can we do something about this? And that's why I said I'm a massive techno optimist. I think we do need to portray the idea that there are things we can do and we should get on and do them rather than it's all awful and we can't do anything about it or there's nothing I can do as an individual.
::There's nothing we can do as a country. There are things we can do and what's interesting is that, of course, ultimately the world's going to have to introduce technologies to deal with this. And there is a multilateral billion market dollar market. So if you if you do this, you're probably going to do quite well out of it. I mean, so just sort of self-interest would mean that you should do something.
::And that's what I find a bit puzzling about the way that this is sometimes framed as a cost. It's not a cost, it's an investment. And the investment ultimately leads to very big returns, both in terms of society, humanity and the future of the planet, but also it will bring monetary returns as well. And there will be a whole new green economy, which we either in the UK are part of, well, we're not part of.
::And if you're part of it, you need to get on with it. And they need to be very clear signals as to why this is needed and what the urgency is and what the timelines are against which to deliver. Clearly, the sorts of innovation required to achieve net zero are specific to certain sectors. We know already that when it comes to the power sector, we have pretty much most of the technologies we need with wind and solar now being the cheapest form of electricity generation.
::But when it comes to other sectors, hard to harder to abate, like aviation, certain aspects of industry, there's more work needed. And if we look to the future and we worry about the potential for overshooting 1.5 degrees, the whole agenda around greenhouse gas or carbon removals from the atmosphere becomes even more important. And there there's still a huge challenge when it comes to developing technologies and therefore innovation is critical.
::One of the things we saw from the experience of developing the vaccine in the UK was a new approach to government intervention to accelerate that process of innovation through funding, through procurement decisions and regulatory process. And I wondered if I could ask you a little bit about that and try to unpick any lessons for accelerating innovation on the low carbon space.
::I'm thinking of government funding first. Obviously from the outset, the UK government committed a significant amount of funding to the research development, procurement of a COVID vaccine, including through public private partnerships. Thinking about that when the science is complex and evolving. How do you convince policymakers to allocate a signifier amount of resource to specific types of innovation? Yeah, well, obviously, ultimately those are political decisions and what people wish to do.
::But I think what happened during the Vaccines Task Force was a number of things which are important. So I've already talked about taking a portfolio approach that you don't put everything in one place and recognise When you take a portfolio approach, most things will fail. Now the reason I say that is that means the National Audit Office Parliamentary Accounts Committee should not view that as wasted public money and that is a fundamental problem that needs to be resolved if you're going to innovate.
::Most things you touch will fail. That is the price of successful innovation. If the system reacts in a way that says those first five things fail, therefore that's the most monumental waste of public money. It will drive conservative behaviour amongst decision makers, and that's exactly what happens. People are terrified of backing things that will fail. We have to get over that and that needs leadership and it needs accept importance of that risk profile upfront.
::The second thing that I think was very important was the regulators in the case of the vaccines, the MHRA, the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Authority joined very, very early. Right at the beginning. We brought them to the table and that allowed companies and other people to speak to the regulators and say, you know, what is it you're going to be looking for?
::This is what we've got. This is the way things are going now. At some point, the regulators then need to step back because they're going to have to be independent when it comes to the final decision. But they can be very important during the process to try and help guide things. And again, I think regulation is a key question for net zero.
::And it's complicated because there are many, many regulators involved. There isn't a single one you can point to and it includes things like planning. And we know that sort of delays in planning are really big barrier to getting some of this stuff moved quickly. And before I left government, actually, I was asked to do a piece of work on regulation of innovation and did one specifically on green technologies.
::And we made recommendations around the need to integrate some of this so that so that small companies in particular aren't trying to navigate multiple different regulators to get to where they need to be. So there is a regulatory bit, which I think would be important. And the final bit you talked about procurement, and I think a procurement signal from government is very, very important part of this so that people know they have confidence that if they invest for a decade to get the technology going, if the technology delivers what's promised, then there will be a buyer for it because otherwise it's all risk and there's no upside.
::So I think one has to be pragmatic about the sorts of business tools that one could use to stimulate the private sector to do the work that needs to be done, taking into account how successful some of those types of interventions were during the process of developing vaccines around the world on behalf of governments. What more would you like governments around the world to do when it comes to adopting similar approaches to stimulate innovation on the low carbon front?
:: would do that, you'd start at: ::Once you've got that, then there is a question about where your funding goes. So you might argue that there's much more research and development funding needed now to get things off the ground that may be much more scale up funding needed in some areas to move things from successful demonstration through to large scale demonstration. And there may be incentives for mass implementation utilising ocean in terms of subsidies or other things to pull things through.
::So I think it needs an integrated approach. And of course, I'm not advocating that this is a bottomless public pit of money that can fund everything, but there are things that need to need public funding in order to make them happen and in order to ensure that there then is an appropriate market to actually pull these things through.
::And I think that's the stage we're at. And then there are some areas where, you know, government is the funder. So if you take nuclear fusion, you know, which may one day be a source of very clean electricity, only governments are going to fund that sort of research. Now, you know, private sector is beginning to come in and look at it.
:: r, that is not a solution for: ::If you think of China, we think even now under the Biden administration in the U.S. than others, potentially including here in the UK, where we're slightly more nervous, should we say, about doing that sort of thing. Is that a gap? Do you think that's a challenge that you think needs addressing when it comes to getting to net zero?
::Well, I don't think there's any doubt that the moves that the US have made recently have made a big difference. And there's a lot of money going into it and there's a lot of excitement and interest from industry as a result of that which is going to make a difference. I think those things do matter. And, you know, I think I've already sort of declared my hand a bit on this.
::I think if you need to plan this stuff a bit more than in my opinion, you can't just leave it to a completely open market situation, especially if you're not giving that market any signals as to what to do. So I think there is there is absolutely a case for some form of intervention. And I think it's also important to recognise that in a problem like this and this is exactly the same as the Vaccines task force, it's not a problem just for government.
::It's not a problem just for industry and it's not a problem just for academia. So you actually need all three of those bits to be integrated and that integration is central to trying to answer these big questions. You've mentioned the portfolio approach that was taken and accepting that there wasn't just going to be one vaccine, there was going to be many.
::So competition, none or none thankfully, that that didn't happen. But you know, multiple vaccine developers were working in parallel. And so it wasn't just a case of backing one specific technology or one specific developer. So that competition was was almost allowed to coexist. It did coexist. And, you know, at the end of the day, there were some winners and losers in that.
::And that's when it gets pretty uncomfortable, actually. And so it's important again, that's where actually more straightforward business understanding as to how you structure deals in that way becomes really important because there will be people who don't make the technology doesn't work or they just too late or somebody come with something better sooner. And that's going to win out that, you know, that's where the market takes risk and they should absorb some of that risk, but they shouldn't absorb all of the risk.
::And that's why having that clear plan as to what it is the government is looking for and what the government is prepared to pay for or to subsidise or to give some sort of incentives for becomes important. But it isn't for everything. You know, when we set the portfolio up, it wasn't the idea that we would end up buying every single vaccine that worked.
::So collaboration and planning were of vital importance in COVID. And it seems to me that you think they're going to have a role in that area as well, given that the taskforce, the vaccine task force, achieved its mission, do you think there should be a similar approach to net zero? Do you think that governments around the world should be having net zero task Taskforce?
:: k I think they should. And in: ::So that was turned out to be quite useful, but it wasn't designed for that. It was designed for all of these types of things. So I think, yes, net zero is exactly one of those areas. I do think you can have to break it down into components because the problem is it's such a big thing that if you just treat it as a single mission like that, it's probably too unwieldy to get your hands around.
::So you may need to sort of carve it into intersections in order to be able to to deal with it. And then I think government needs this group of engineers at the centre who I think should be systems engineers who have a systems map of the whole thing, because very often decisions made in one area have quite significant implications for other areas.
::So unless you have a proper systems view of it, you won't get this outcome to its ultimate goal. So long answer to question, but I think the answer is yes. There are some very clear mission like things in here, and then I think there needs to be a total whole systems engineering view of how they all fit together.
::So perhaps a series of net zero tasks. Yeah. Is to break up the problem. I think that's probably right. Otherwise, otherwise it's just too much. And you know, you want some but you want you do need to be able to see the end of what your taskforce is going to do in order to drive that speed and urgency.
::And I think people do move on and you want this many people to stay with it as you can. Can I ask a related question? Obviously that makes a lot of sense. At the same time, one of the critical learnings you said from the COVID experience in driving innovation to develop the vaccines was having a single point of accountable leadership.
::How does that translate into what's needed to stimulate innovation on net zero? What's the what's the equivalent given the complexities and the multifaceted challenge that that decarbonising multiple sides of the economy requires? Well, so I think that if you if you break the overall problem down into some sort of sensible chunks so you could take sort of decarbonisation of electricity as one of those chunks, you could do that with a single point of accountability, empowered leader to drive that as a way forward.
::That is that is a doable thing. Of course, at the sort of macro level across all of the different areas that need to happen. That's where the systems engineering approach is needed that then needs political leadership at the top of the whole thing to drive it forward in a long term way. And I think that's that's the other point that's important.
::This this shouldn't flip flop between different choices. I mean, we have to stay consistent. These are long term things to invest in and they need some consistency if we're going to deliver. Understood. Turning now to another element of the response that we saw pretty effectively always, but on the whole during the pandemic, the role of communication, thinking about that, that issue, you played a key role in communicating with both policymakers and the public through the pandemic.
::There's a huge task to do when it comes to communicating in relation to climate. What lessons did you learn about gaining public buy, in particular for new innovations that could be useful for getting to net zero? Well, I think some of the lessons learnt on that. First of all, I think as much of this should be in the public domain as possible, some of those make sure that the scientific evidence, the engineering evidence, the advice being given is public.
::That's important. I think it's crucial to see that there is political leadership for this. And I think, you know, we did what we could do from a sort of science and medical perspective, but it also required politicians to say what they were going to do as well. And I think that was an openness to that, which is an important lesson.
:: n which the seemingly distant: ::Clearly, it's not always just about technology. We can we've talked a bit about the sort of innovation we might need to see in policy, potentially even in business models, but also potentially around how to stimulate behaviour change. One of the things you managed to achieve was through effective communication, achieve extraordinary changes in behaviour very quickly amongst huge populations.
::Are there parallels or are there lessons to be learnt from that experience that could translate in terms of the challenge to get to net zero? One of the things I think is important is everybody, not everybody, but most people are concerned about this net zero. I mean, I don't think the majority of the population is complacent in any way whatsoever about this.
::People see the changes, the extreme weather events and other things, and they worry about it. They worry about it for themselves, for their future generations, where I think it's less clear. So what can I do about it? And that I think, is an area that needs a lot of work and where behavioural science will be important to try and give people the tools to be able to do things differently and where clear advice on what difference you can make as an individual becomes important.
::And one of the things that I think is often forgotten is that the little things that you do as individuals, which may seem inconsequential when you look at the grand problem, when you multiply them by millions of people turn out not to be little things. They turn out to be impactful things. So, you know, eating a bit less meat is is something that would make a difference across the entire population.
::Deciding to fly less would make a difference across the population. So there is a demand side to this, which is going to be important if we're going to if we're going to get to this. And just before I left government, we published a report on looking at the relative balance of demand side versus technical supply side solutions. And you can see obviously the scale of what you need to do is quite different depending on what choices people make as to what they want to do personally.
::But we need to be realistic. I mean, it's not, in my opinion, realistic to assume everyone can change to an electric car tomorrow. You can't, but you can over time. And there are ways to do that and there are ways to incentivise that and get that in the right place. So I think we need to have a much personally, I think we need a much clearer set of things that people understand what they as individuals can do that are really stick and implementable.
::And should government lead that? Well, I think governments got a big role in that. Yeah, I mean, not to not to I'm not suggesting that government needs to sort of start banning things and making those sorts of decisions now. But there are there people want to do this. People actually want to make a difference. I just not quite sure how to.
::So I think there are things that government absolutely should take accountability for. I wanted to end our discussion by bringing this back to the climate crisis. And of course, you you had a really important role on the Net-zero Innovation Board. Which in which areas do you think innovation going to play a critical role when it comes to getting to net zero?
::Yeah, So I think I think on the on the generation side, you know, where are we going to get our parcels is from. I think it's very clear that wind particularly is going to be important, solar's going to be important, nuclear's going to be important. And there are technologies such as small modular reactors for nuclear that provide options.
::So I think there are technologies you can see there that could make a could could really get to a very significant place of replacing fossil fuels on that. I suspect there's going to be some need for what there is going to be a need for a transition period. So there will be fossil fuels in the mix for a while there.
::So there you have to make sure you've got carbon capture as well. And that is a technology that really needs to be pushed hard to make sure that we can offset that, that residual part of carbon emissions for that side of things. On the transport side, clearly electric vehicles can make a huge difference. But then we need to make sure we've got the power generation to be able to to support that and the charging infrastructure.
::So those are sort of delivery problems rather than discovery problems of technologies. But then there are things like, you know, where is hydrogen going to fit into that mix and where's it going to fit in for certain types of other types of heavy goods, vehicles for trains, for where's shipping going to get its solution from, which could be hydrogen, could be ammonia, could be something else.
::So there are there are areas where you can sort of see what the options are. And those options need to now we need to say, well, what is it you would need to see to say, I now believe option one is the right one and we're going to go behind that and scale it because you can't keep all of them going as potential options for decades.
::You have to settle at some point and say, what are you going to go after? So I think those those are key areas. And then just coming back to the electricity supply, one of the things that we absolutely need to do is make sure that we understand about storage of electricity because we're going to end up with the need to store much more than we currently store.
::And we need to have the grid designed in a way that allows that to get distributed appropriately across the country. So there are some technology challenges there that come in as well. So those are some of the sort of immediate ones that you can see. And then, of course, a whole load of new exciting things coming on some a long way off, like really referred to nuclear fusion.
::Others others perhaps coming in in a more medium term that can make a difference that we need to continue working on. Well, a real agenda for action there on net zero. I want to come back to those seven lessons that you mentioned at the start, the seven lessons that you learned during the pandemic that you think could help us to deal with the urgent challenge of the climate crisis as well.
::Could you summarise those seven? Yeah, this is a number one is have a clear objective, clear time bound, measurable objective. Number two is put in place single point, accountable, empowered leadership and truly make it in power. Third is bring experts into government quickly. By that I mean within weeks, not in months or years. Really have a system to bring experts in, bring together an approach that includes R&D, manufacturing and procurement.
::Don't just think about this is one of those problems. It's all of those problems integrated. Be prepared to have public private partnerships in this and bring the sectors together to make something happened. Be prepared to take a portfolio risk and accept that things will fail and don't view the failure as a waste of public money. And at all times you're doing this.
::Think about the legacy. What is it that you want to have at the end of that, the end of the task force that would enable that to continue in some way? And those are those I think with the seven features which were important. That's extremely helpful. Thank you, sir. Patrick, just to close a final thought, if we're successful in doing all those things, if we learn those lessons, apply them successfully to the innovation that we need to see to achieve net zero, how do we ensure that the fruits of that success in terms of innovation are shared equitably?
::One of the challenges we still see around COVID vaccine development is that not all countries have benefited equally from access to vaccines. How do we ensure that that doesn't happen when it comes to the technologies we need to decarbonise our economies thinking globally? Yeah, and I think it's worth noting that during COVID, I mean, the AstraZeneca vaccine, which came from Oxford and was a UK thing, was actually produced at very low cost to make sure it was available across the world.
::Now that wasn't true for all of them and I think there is a big international question there about how we make sure that the technologies that come through are not just for the wealthy countries because we won't solve the problem by just solving it in one country exactly the same as a pandemic you have to solve everywhere if you're going to solve it.
::So I think there are some fundamental economic questions there about how much the world is prepared to make differential pricing across different countries in order to allow this to be something that's a solution globally. Because if it isn't if it isn't global, then it will mean achieving net zero in one country is not going to solve the climate problem.
::It has to be global. Absolutely. Sir Patrick, thank you very, very much indeed for that fascinating discussion. It really has been a pleasure to hear from your experience and learn the lessons in terms of informing the action we need to take to achieve net zero. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure. A huge thank you to our guest, Sir Patrick Vallance, for such a thought provoking discussion on addressing the climate crisis with the same urgency and wide scale innovation that we saw in the development of the COVID 19 vaccine.
::SIMON What have we got coming up in our next episodes? Well, Nina, I'm really looking forward to the discussions we've got lined up. We're going to be talking to our guests about three key types of innovation we need for net zero. Firstly, rapidly scaling up existing solutions such as offshore wind. Secondly, innovating new technologies, and thirdly, reinventing business models.
::You'll be able to find all our episodes on the carbon tax website and all major streaming platforms. So please follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and you can follow us on social media for updates on our next episodes that will be going live shortly. Thank you for listening. Thank you.
