House Share from Hell 22

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“They were typically a little bit lighter at the weekends, about 12 hours.”

We moved onto his life behind-the-scenes during the peaks of the pandemic, and the professor talked of the routine 16-hour working days: “They were typically a little bit lighter at the weekends, about 12 hours.” These days, which included meetings with officials and scientists, sometimes began with a 5:30 am phone call to Downing Street.

I was curious as to whether there was any relaxation time, he told me that - when possible - he’d go on a run: “You get some music on, and get into your own zone.”

Asked to identify his favourite song to run to, he says it depended on his mood. “So if I’m in a running-fast mood”- he laughs, admitting ‘fast’ is a relative term for him - “I like a bit of Flo Rida ‘Club Can’t Handle Me’ - whatever it’s called. That one gets your energy levels going. But I’ve very eclectic musical tastes - anything from 60s, through the 70s and into the current day. I’m mainly a 70s child”.

I asked him whether he has a stand-out Covid day: “Yes, I do. It was sometime in late November [2020] when I was working on the Vaccine Taskforce.”

On this day, they heard the news that the vaccine worked well to prevent infection and death. “At that point,” he admits, “I got very tearful - actually, in the privacy of my own home. I realised we were going to be able to bring this pandemic to a quicker close than we would’ve been able to without them.”

The professor revealed how once vaccines were created, the government was still only halfway there. Deciding how to dispense the vaccine was as much of a challenge: “Just getting the vaccines, so they were available, and then getting them delivered felt like a mission.”

“It really felt like a war,” he declared, “every second counted, and every single jab mattered.”

Since Covid, there has been talk as to the likelihood and severity of future pandemics, so I wanted to get JVT’s scientific perspective. Alas this was rather bleak: “I can pretty much assure your readers,” he said, “that there’ll be at least one more pandemic in the 21st century. But probably more than that.”

He warned that there’s a link between pandemics and how humans currently treat the natural world: “The more humans encroach on the animal kingdom and on natural habitats, the more likely it is that we will come into contact with funny new infections, which have been there all along in animals - but not harming humans.”

“I’m not a climate change expert, but as humans encroach on animal habitats, there’s no question that we’re going to get exposed to more stuff.”

So what’s Sir Professor Van-Tam’s future now?

Stepping out of the limelight as UoN’s Pro-Vice Chancellor for the Medicine and Health Sciences, he identified the challenge to produce health care workers for the next generation: “If we stop producing healthcare workers who are really good,” he declares, “then we’ve failed in our social mission.”

By Lucinda Dodd