Speakers

Fergus Walsh is the BBC's medical editor and one of its longest serving journalists. He was appointed to the role in 2020 after being medical correspondent since 2004. He mainly focuses on medical innovation, ethics and global disease threats. Fergus played a key role in the BBC’s coverage of the Covid pandemic. During the first lockdown he was the first TV journalist to produce an in-depth eye-witness report from inside an NHS intensive care unit. He was present when the first volunteers received the Oxford Covid vaccine, producing exclusive reports for BBC News.

Fergus is based at New Broadcasting House in London and appears on TV news programmes from BBC Breakfast through to the Ten o’clock TV News on BBC1. His reports are seen globally via BBC World News. He can be heard on BBC radio, on the Today programme, BBC Radio 5 Live and occasionally on the Newscast podcast. He also writes for the BBC news website.

Fergus has written and presented more than a dozen documentaries for the BBC, mostly for Panorama, the world’s longest-running investigative TV programme.

Fergus went to the Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe. He studied English Literature at Leeds University and then radio journalism in Falmouth. He began reporting for the BBC in May 1984 and within weeks had his first voice piece on national radio.

Fergus became one of the BBC's youngest specialist reporters, covering home and legal affairs. In 1990 he moved to television news, covering political, diplomatic and education issues, before moving to health and science from 1993.

Fergus has reported from more than two dozen countries on topics such as malaria, TB, HIV, obesity, genetics, antibiotic resistance, healthy ageing and medical ethics. He has volunteered for several medical trials, including testing a vaccine against H5N1 avian flu. He has had his brain, heart and other organs scanned for television reports. In 2009 he appeared as himself in an Emmy award-winning TV drama with Dame Julie Walters about assisted dying.