Jonathan Van-Tam

Sir Jonathan Stafford Nguyen Van-Tam (born 2 February 1964) is a British physician specialising in influenza, including its epidemiology, transmission, vaccinology, antiviral drugs and pandemic preparedness.

After hospital work, Van-Tam was involved variously as a university lecturer and within the pharmaceutical industry. Van-Tam became a Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England on 2 October 2017. He played a very significant part in the UK's response to the Covid-19 pandemic which started in 2020 as one of two deputies. In May 2023 he joined Covid-19 vaccine maker Moderna as a consultant.

Van-Tam was born and grew up in Boston, Lincolnshire. He is partially of Vietnamese descent; his grandfather was Nguyễn Văn Tâm, the Prime Minister of the State of Vietnam, and his uncle, Nguyễn Văn Hinh, was Chief Of Staff of the Vietnamese National Army and the first Vietnamese officer in the French Armed Forces to be promoted to the rank of general. He attended Boston Grammar School where his father, Paul Nguyen Van-Tam, was a teacher of Mathematics. He graduated in medicine from the University of Nottingham in 1987. He was awarded bachelor's degrees in Medical Sciences in 1985 and a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (BM BS) in 1987. He was awarded a Doctorate of Medicine (DM) in 2001, supported by a thesis on epidemiology.

After five years of hospital-based clinical medicine, Van-Tam pursued academic training in public health and epidemiology and developed an interest in influenza and respiratory viruses, mentored for many years by Professor Karl Nicholson. He became a senior lecturer at the University of Nottingham (and consultant regional epidemiologist, Public Health Laboratory Service) in 1997, before joining the pharmaceutical industry as an associate director at SmithKline Beecham in 2000.

In April 2001 he moved to Roche as head of medical affairs, before joining Aventis Pasteur MSD in February 2002 as UK medical director.

Van-Tam returned to the public sector in 2004 at the Health Protection Agency Centre for Infections, where he was head of the pandemic influenza office until October 2007. He then returned to Nottingham as professor of health protection. He has published over 100 scientific papers and written four textbooks. He chaired the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) Expert Advisory Group on H5N1 human vaccines, sits on the UK national Scientific Pandemic Influenza Committee (SPI), and was a member of the UK Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) during the 2009-10 pandemic. He is co-editor of the textbook Introduction to Pandemic Influenza and was editor-in-chief of the journal Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses from 2014 to 2017.

His unit is an officially designated WHO Collaborating Centre for pandemic influenza and research and a UK Faculty of Public Health "National Treasure" research training location.

Since 2014, he has been chair of the UK government's New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG).