4.00 Welcome - Kamran Abbasi, executive editor of The BMJ
MC Phil Hammond, Doctor and journalist for Private Eye

4.05 New variants: what are they, where do they come from, and what might they do?
(Chair: George Davey Smith, University of Bristol)
- Aine O’ Toole, PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh
- Ravindra Gupta, professor of clinical microbiology, at the University of Cambridge
- Wendy Barclay, chair in influenza virology at Imperial College London.

4.40 What do we know about how particular variants influence transmission, severity and immunity?
(Chair: Kamran Abbasi, BMJ)
- Muge Cevik, clinical fellow at the University of St Andrews) on B.1.1.7 (Kent) variant
- Richard Lessells, Group Leader: KRISP University of KwaZulu-Natal on B.1.351 (South African) variant
- Esther Sabino, departamento de Molestias Infecciosas e Parasitarias, University of Sao Paolo) on P1 (Brazillian) variant

5.15 Future of the pandemic
(chair: Allyson Pollock, clinical professor of public health at the Newcastle University)
- Jeffrey Barret, director of the COVID-19 Genomics Initiative at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, on Surveillance/genomics
- Alexandra L. Phelan, Adjunct Professor in Global and Public Health Law at Georgetown University, Washington DC, on what variants mean for border closures
- Akiko Iwasaki, Professor of Immunobiology and Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at Yale School of Medicine, on how variants affect vaccine efficacy and implications for policy