This post is co-authored with Dr Colin Axon, Senior Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering, Brunel University London, UK. Whenever new evidence is produced demonstrating the ineffectiveness of masks, whether cloth, surgical, or N95/FP2, in preventing community transmission of Covid and other respiratory viruses, a commentator can be guaranteed to claim that different standards of evaluation should… Read More »
At the very beginning of the pandemic, the official view, based on the science of the time, was that masks had no value outside health care settings… This work informed the starting position of the World Health Organization and many public health leaders with experience in the field. Scepticism about the value of masks was… Read More »
…it would be nice to think that the biomedical and public health elites in the UK and North America thought in a more nuanced way about the “Orient”, not least because of the wide influence of Edward Said’s critique of such thinking. We should, however, be used to disappointment when it comes to pandemic measures.… Read More »
Many countries have developed a narrative about the unique incompetence of their governments in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. This has been a convenient stick with which political opponents can beat those in power and biomedical elites can advance their claims to displace democracy and the rule of law as the source of state legitimacy.… Read More »
Another day, another report revealing the damage from COVID policies to children and their development. A BBC study has found a 10 percent increase in the number of 5- and 6-year-olds in England requiring specialist speech and language support in the last year. This is the group whose pre-school experiences were most disrupted by pandemic… Read More »
Inspector Gregory: Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention? Holmes: To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. Inspector Gregory: The dog did nothing in the night-time. Holmes: That was the curious incident. The Adventure of Silver Blaze (1892) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle …The lack… Read More »
…Even a monarch cannot countermand the fundamentals of the universe. This is a lesson that some still struggle with in considering the goals of clinical medicine and public health. If they only had enough money, power and time, biomedical scientists could eliminate infection and, at least by implication, allow humans to live forever. Philosophers, ethicists… Read More »
I am not a member of Collateral Global, but they were sufficiently interested in what a sociologist might have to say about pandemics as to invite me to be interviewed by Jennie Bristow, another UK sociologist, on their behalf. We discussed the role of the historical and sociological imagination in making sense of the past… Read More »
An editorial in the British Medical Journal has called for a reappraisal of the criticism of overtreatment by Ivan Illich, a commentator on cultural issues who had a considerable influence in the late 1960s and 1970s. My response notes that this part of Illich’s work relies on reflexive work by the medical profession itself. Focussing… Read More »
‘Judge me in a year’ said Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s State Epidemiologist, in July 2020, when his country was being attacked for sticking to its pandemic plan rather than adopting the novel intervention of lockdown. The latest World Health Organization figures add to the evidence that has been accumulating since summer 2021. Sweden managed the pandemic… Read More »