The hullabaloo over Covid-19 vaccine recommendations in the US raises some interesting questions about other areas where public health elites have been outraged about shifts towards policies that many of us in Europe would take for granted… Mandates may be the right policy in the US context of small government and family privacy but let… Read More »
Democracy should certainly be informed by expert knowledge but democratic governments are entitled to take their own view on the policies that might follow. Benajmin Disraeli, a 19th century UK conservative politician, once commented, after a major extension in the franchise, that political elites must now educate their masters. Disraeli showed a degree of humility… Read More »
Wherever you stand on the management of the Covid-19 pandemic, it is hard not to accept that it has created a serious crisis of legitimacy for the liberal social and political order… …The consequence was a set of state-backed interventions that were neither rational nor legal but harked back to an earlier time of traditional… Read More »
The immediate reaction to the emergence of a novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in Wuhan, China, has focused on its challenges to the biomedical sciences. But the new infection is at least as big a challenge to the social sciences. If we continue to neglect this, there is a serious danger that we end up with mistaken… Read More »
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 »