The Covid-19 pandemic has, almost inevitably, exposed important differences in writing about the history of disease. Is this a narrative driven by a desire to win an argument in the present or is it intended to reconstruct the thinking of the past in its own terms?… This clash is particularly evident in the disputes about… Read More »
Christopher Nolan’s film about J Robert Oppenheimer makes for a long evening and requires serious concentration. Cillian Murphy’s performance in the central role is an extraordinary representation of a man tormented by many demons even before his role in the atomic bomb programme… Such a richly textured film also has footnotes that are worth a… 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 »
As the UK Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Jonathan Van Tam, said in a recent press conference, the current statistics on Covid-19 infections may be almost as good as we will ever get…. The opening of the end game also means the start of attempts to control the story ahead of the inevitable lessons learned inquiry.… Read More »
Humans have lived with infectious diseases for at least 15,000 years. Many of these are shared with animals. They infect us, we infect them and, from time to time, there is a new crossover, as with Covid-19…. Humanity has a long history of dealing with these things. What history shows us is that the only… Read More »
…policies have been made by people with very narrow life experiences and imposed on others with whom there is ‘no intercourse and no sympathy’…This indifference is as true of our scientific and medical elites as of our politicians and public servants. Although STEM disciplines have traditional been ladders of social mobility, we are seeing the… Read More »
The COVID-19 pandemic has had enormous effects on health, wellbeing, and economies worldwide. Governments have responded with rapid and sometimes radical public health interventions. As nations grapple with the question of how to regain normality without unnecessarily endangering lives or healthcare systems, some scientists have argued for policies to encourage or compel the use of… Read More »