Chickenpox jab UK rollout, and how the US grabbed Maduro
PodcastsThe Naked ScientistsChickenpox jab UK rollout, and how the US grabbed MaduroPlus, why "space junk" could cancel our holiday plans. . . 09 January 2026This week, the UK begins the rollout of the. . .
PodcastsThe Naked ScientistsChickenpox jab UK rollout, and how the US grabbed MaduroPlus, why "space junk" could cancel our holiday plans. . . 09 January 2026This week, the UK begins the rollout of the chickenpox vaccine to younger children. But why is it only being offered now? Plus, the high-level technological plan to capture Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro, what the latest research says about the health of vegan and vegetarian diets in the young, and the risks posed by "space junk" that falls back to Earth. . . The UK rolls out chickenpox vaccine for childrenSir Andrew Pollard, Oxford Vaccine GroupAll young children in the UK are being offered protection against chickenpox by the NHS for the first time. The vaccine is in combination with the existing MMR jab, which is already offered at 12 and 18 months of age, and is expected to reduce the number of families affected by the virus each year. But why is the UK only rolling out the vaccine now when it has been used safely for decades in countries such as the US and Australia? Chris Smith has been speaking with Sir Andrew Pollard from the Oxford Vaccine Group…Andrew - Chickenpox is a virus which affects almost all children by the time they reach 10 years of age, and usually they acquire it from one of their brothers or sisters or from another child either at nursery or at some other play group. And it starts with a really high temperature, which can last for a couple of days, and then they start developing the rash all over the body as spots, which tend to blister, and then eventually crust over and become very itchy. The period of time that the spots come out usually lasts about five days or so, and most children, despite having a very miserable time, will fully recover. Unfortunately, there is a small proportion who develop very severe complications of chickenpox, some developing a brain infection with the virus or a severe pneumonia. The most common complication we see is actually bacterial infections, which occur in children with chickenpox and can be very severe and life-threatening, just like those other viral complications. Chris - The other thing we worry about, of course, is that this virus keeps coming back, doesn't it, because it persists in the nervous system throughout life, and we can get nasty manifestations as we get older?Andrew - Absolutely. So once we've had chickenpox as a child, the virus lives with us for the whole of our lives, as you say sitting in the nervous system, and over time, immunity against that virus reduces. Increasingly commonly, over the age of 55 people develop shingles, which in itself is pretty miserable. It looks very similar to the chickenpox rash, but the main problem with it is some, after recovery, will develop long-term pain in the skin where the shingles rash has come out, and that's not only unpleasant for them, but it's also very expensive for the NHS to treat. Chris - Therefore, the rationale for the vaccine is what exactly? Because if 90% of the population have been catching this for thousands of years, why do we need a vaccine for it now? What's the motivation?Andrew - Well, the motivation for vaccination is chiefly around to try to stop children from getting this miserable disease and the very serious complications that we see in the hospital, and the test that we do to decide whether it's of value to the national health system is called cost-effectiveness. There is such a burden on the health system from this virus that it actually will save money for the health service to vaccinate children. Beyond that, we also know that because parents have to take an average of five days off work to look after each child who develops chickenpox, but that's not taken into account to make decisions on new vaccine introduction, but it is another huge benefit of having the programme. Chris - And what does the vaccine that's being introduced look like? As in, how's it being given? When's it being given? And how does it work?Andrew - Well, the vaccine is actually just made of a weakened form of the chickenpox virus and it's given as an injection at 12 months and at 18 months of age, and with that the vast majority of people will develop a strong immune response to those two doses and then will be prevented from getting chickenpox, and indeed in the countries that have introduced the vaccine already they essentially see chickenpox disappear but more importantly from my perspective as a paediatrician, the hospitalisations and the deaths from chickenpox stop. Chris - The Americans have been doing this for about 30 years, since they, I think it was 1995, they introduced chickenpox vaccination. Why has it taken us three decades to catch up, then?Andrew - Yeah, so they did, as you say, introduce initially with a single dose of the vaccine, and then they switched to using two doses. Really, the data that they've accumulated about the impact of the programme is one of the things that filled in the gaps for the analysis that we do to make decisions on introducing vaccines, and there was a lot of uncertainty about some of those impacts that I was talking about. For example, just the burden on the hospital system, the data had to be generated around just how many complications of chickenpox. But the key reason why there was a slow uptake here was the uncertainty about what would happen about the rate of shingles in older adults if the vaccine was introduced, and that's because although we think the chickenpox vaccine in the long run will make shingles very very rare, and so 60, 70, 80 years from now shingles should really become a very rare condition. In the meantime, until we get to that point, we will have a long period of time where most of us as adults will have had chickenpox as a child, and it was thought that having our own children who had chickenpox and we were exposed to them would then boost our own immunity, and if that was true it meant that introducing a vaccine programme for children could - over some decades - increase the risk of shingles in older adults. Now, what emerged from the data from countries like the US was that that was not true; that it turns out that the importance of being exposed to your own children with chickenpox to protect you from shingles is fairly minimal, and so when you crunch the numbers, it actually makes a lot of sense to get on the backs of their children. Venezuela's Maduro captured by cutting-edge technologyRamsay Faragher, Royal Institute of NavigationThe capture of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in the country’s capital Caracas was - by any estimation - quite remarkable. It involved months of planning by US authorities, and some of the world’s most advanced technology. Stealth drones, real-time surveillance, and GPS were all deployed to keep tabs on Maduro, and even his pets. Additionally, signal jamming and cyber attacks allowed the US military to disrupt Venezuela’s air defence and communications ahead of the dramatic operation. Chris Smith asked Ramsey Faragher, Director of the Royal Institute of Navigation to bring us up to speed…Ramsey - The US used 150 aircraft, and an aircraft carrier, and about a dozen vessels off the coast of Venezuela to nip in, kidnap the Venezuelan president Maduro, and nip him back to America to be put on trial for drugs trafficking charges, and they managed to do everything I've just said all within the space of about two hours. So it was an incredible operation, and I'm sure there was a Hollywood movie in the making as I speak. I actually got a little hint that something interesting was going on that morning. About three hours before the raid actually happened, all of the US military aircraft in the United States turned off their transponders, which is such an interestingly unusual thing to happen that it was being discussed on Twitter and on various WhatsApp groups that I'm on. So some of us who were interested in tracking and what aircraft are up to, what ships are up to via all of their transponders, we all figured something interesting was about to go down when that happened three hours before the raid. Chris - Were these the kinds of things that are piloted craft? Or was this, as we're seeing increasingly in Ukraine, drones and unmanned vehicles?Ramsey - It was just about everything in the arsenal. It was amazing that they used the Air Force, the Navy, Special Forces, the Coast Guard, their cyber units, their Space Force. Almost every branch of the military seemed to have been brought in and involved. Everything from helicopters, refuelling tankers, lots of different types of aircraft. The most modern stealth aircraft, like the F-22 and the F-35, and older aircraft as well that are not stealthy. Lots of drones were used of various types and ages. So they really threw everything at this, and it was because they needed to wipe out all of the air defences. They had to ensure, I think, that the worst-case scenario did not happen, which would have been Maduro being shot down and killed as they stole him from his own country. I think for various reasons, they had to ensure that did not happen. And so they used a huge barrage of Tomahawk missiles and stealthy aircraft to take out the air defences. They used other aircraft to blanket, jam, and interfere with any radar units that perhaps are mobile, or ones that were passive that they didn't have a good understanding of where they were physically located. And they would have had dozens of drones providing lots of eyes from the sky in infrared, and in radar, to give them a live understanding of the whole area that they were operating in. Chris - But this kind of operation must have been months, if not even longer than that, in the planning, mustn't it? To get that executed that well takes planning. Ramsey - I suspect that these sorts of operations exist in playbooks that always exist. And it's a matter of updating those playbooks as the years go by, as your capabilities improve. So at some point last year, it would have first been mooted that they would try to go and get him. And probably there were discussions about whether that meant kill him or put him on trial. And then, yeah, they would have spent months actually working from that playbook to put all of this stuff together. One of the interesting things that's been going on is that in the months leading up to this kidnapping, they have been blockading the ports and trying to stop the flow of oil from Venezuela. Basically, oil being transferred to countries that are under sanction, like Russia and others, and so there's been an operation going on off the coast for a number of months to do that blockade. And in fact, just a couple of hours ago, as we record this, the Americans have taken over a tanker that had been sailing under a Russian flag and had left Venezuela a few days ago. So all of that background operation of the dark fleet and the oil sanctions and blockade that have been going on has been a very convenient and perfect cover, if you like, for having all of these assets just off the coast, aircraft carriers, destroyers of various types. On the original mission of we're here to do this blockade, but clearly the secondary mission was that in a couple of months we're going in for Maduro. And by having all of those vessels and aircraft just off the coast for so long, they'd have been able to do huge amounts of surveillance and work up this pattern of life through satellite information, drone data, and probably the special forces and spies, fundamentally, going into the area in the last few months leading up to this event. Chris - Because there's even this claim that they were watching his pets. Because you're thinking, have they got one of those tracking collars on the dogs? Or it's probably eyes in the sky, isn't it? Watching the pets, because I suppose where the pets are is where the people are. And that's why they're interested in the pets. Ramsey - Exactly. That was mentioned in the briefing. So important enough, I think, for them to drop it in. And it could be anything from Maduro was probably moving around between different safe houses, potentially just as normal. And so in some respects, seeing from the eyes in the sky, from the drones, which dogs are running around in which garden of which residents when, is probably a really good indicator. As you say, it could be something even more incredibly high tech, like there's an AirTag on the dog's collar or something like this. And they know how to sneakily read AirTags and things like that. So it was important enough to be mentioned. And we'll wait for the Hollywood movie to find out which one it was, I think.