An unexpected element of post-pandemic reflections has been the revival of interest in the work of Ivan Illich, a significant public intellectual of the 1960s and 1970s, whose star has waned somewhat in recent decades… What does it do to a society when the very definition of health and illness comes to be monopolized by… Read More »
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 »
A discussion with Iain Martin and Alastair Benn about the UK response to the pandemic and the inquiry’s approach. Find it at https://reaction.life/reaction-podcast-robert-dingwall-covid/
Last week, I spent a very pleasant evening at one of the surviving medieval churches in the City of London – the foundations of St Giles Cripplegate go back at least one thousand years, although most of the present building dates to 1304, via several restorations. The occasion was the launch of Breakable by Sue… Read More »
“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely…”, observed the English historian, Lord Acton, writing to a friend in 1857. This widely-quoted aphorism should lead us to reflect on the absolute powers that the World Health Organization is currently seeking for its Director-General (DG). The organization has abandoned the broad, interdisciplinary, vision of health… Read More »
The Great Mask Debate is limping towards closure. While there is no single conclusive piece of evidence, the best research points towards there being little or no general benefit from the mass use of masks in the community. It is even doubtful whether there is much value from requiring masks in health care settings or… Read More »
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 »