Professor Luke O’Neill, like many immunology and public health experts, has had an incredibly busy 15 months since the arrival of COVID-19.
He is among a group of scientists and health officials who rose to prominence while providing their insight during the pandemic.
Professor O’Neill, from the School of Biochemistry and Immunology at Trinity College Dublin, was a regular on The Pat Kenny show even before March 2020.
He joined Bobby Kerr on Down to Business live from the Bray seafront today to discuss the past year.
He explained that the burden of responsibility when informing the public of health information relating to the pandemic is "just to get it right".
"I'm only doing it to get the facts out and to get the information across to people," Professor O’Neill said.
"So when I'm on with Pat [Kenny] I make sure I'm telling the facts as they are.
"There's a massive appetite [for information on COVID-19], unbelievable, for obvious reasons, everybody wants to know about it.
"The big hope is, let's get out of this as soon as we can.
"Secondly, I'm over the moon that the science has delivered for highly-potent, efficacious, safe vaccines in the course of nine months.
"Can you believe it, when Pfizer got their first report back in November, we now have these vaccines.
"I'm overjoyed in a sense because science has delivered on this great, great promise."
Many people tuned in to listen to Professor O’Neill since the advent of coronavirus to hear his analysis of the virus explained in layman's terms.
"It's not that difficult, just don't use too many technical terms," he said of his skill at cutting through the often dense scientific terminology.
"Jargon is atrocious, so try and avoid the jargon is the simple message there."
Legacy
On what the legacy of the pandemic will be, he believes we will look back on what a great achievement it was for science that effective vaccines were developed so quickly and safely.
"I think it's that science has delivered, that will be the bottom line and the fantastic performance of those drug companies," Professor O’Neill stated.
"Most of those vaccines have been made with universities and drug companies working together so it's a great collaboration between the two.
"2.6 billion have had one shot of a vaccine in the world, 60% in Ireland have had one shot, what a great achievement.
"They're safe and highly efficacious, they are the only way out of this pandemic really so the legacy will be science triumphing over this virus.
He added that COVID-19 "very much so" prepares us for future pandemics.
"The G7 announced this preparedness campaign to get ready for the next one and don't let it happen again, in other words, put the fire out much more quickly with what we're learned from this thing," he said.
You can listen to Professor Luke O'Neill on the ‘Show Me the Science’ podcast on Newstalk here, or on The Pat Kenny Show on weekdays here.
