In an interview for Science blog, Professor Landray explains that he mooted the idea on 28 Feburary 2020, in an email to Sir Jeremy Farrar, the head of Wellcome. A few days later, they discussed it on a No 18 bus to Marylebone. Sir Jeremy suggested he join forces with Professor Horby, an expert in infectious diseases and epidemiology and a nodding acquaintance from Oxford’s medical science community. And the rest really is history.
Imagine saving a million lives. While the world was in the first throes of the pandemic and paralysed in the face of the seemingly unstoppable spread of the coronavirus, two Oxford professors, Peter Horby and Martin Landray, started a trial which is estimated to have saved around one million lives with a £5 medicine that is available across the world.
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John Cairns