Moonshot: it's odd to stress just one of the possible technological advances not yet made as a way towards a normal life [very fast cheap tests]. More and better therapies is another. Multiple vaccines is the third.

It also feels like a rhetorical distraction from the task of sorting out the testing [+ tracing] system using technology that DOES exist, and has been a big part of the reason for our much worse virus trajectory than some other countries.

'Let's do a moonshot!' tries to drown out the reply 'But how come we can't fix the clutches on the number 23 buses yet?'

If we are going to start spouting things that cost £100s of bns, there are other items on the hypothetical list that would chip away at mortality from covid19 too.

Like more robust social care; less overcrowded social housing; a permanent fix for homelessness. Not very sexy, because there's no dambuster / codebreaker invention that we have yet to come up with in the nick of time.

Oh, and an extension to the furlough scheme, or a super generous temporary unemployment insurance that does not force millions to try to break social distancing in order to feed themselves.

Johnson sounds not serious. Verging on the mendacious. Like he is half-remembering something his iphone photographed from one of Dom's flipcharts. Was 'armies of molecular, karate 9th dan bots injected into the lungs to do hand to hand combat with the virus' also on there?