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 »
As we pass two years from the beginnings of the pandemic, many commentators are scrambling to distance themselves from their initial responses, especially where these promoted approaches like Zero-Covid. This is an interview that I gave to an online magazine aimed at older people and carers on 7 April 2020… Would I change anything, given… Read More »
A year ago, we in the UK were approaching Christmas and New Year with quiet optimism as the first Covid vaccines rolled out into the NHS. Light was appearing at the end of a long dark tunnel. Sadly, that hope was extinguished by the emergence of Covid variants, first alpha and later delta. Much of… Read More »
…It may be a difficult moment for bioethicists to stand against the tide – but if bioethicists are not prepared to get going when the going gets tough, what is the point of the field? Are we obliged to agree with Nietzsche that philosophy is “most often a desire of the heart that has been… Read More »
… The state of the face mask debate is rather as if Galileo had published his account of the heliocentric universe and then included a paragraph at the end telling the reader to ignore all the evidence because the Church had declared that everything revolved around the Earth. In the absence of better-quality work –… Read More »
The dust is settling on the UK House of Commons report, produced jointly by its Select Committees on health and on science and technology, about the initial handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. Predictably, the government’s critics have used its 20/20 hindsight to argue that many lives would have been saved if only they had been… Read More »
…What I do want to highlight is that the Chinese state and people take TCM very seriously, that it has played a significant role in their pandemic response, and that you would really not know this from the mainstream Western media. Our understanding of the pandemic in China is framed by our own conceptions of… Read More »
A troubling turn in the public policy management of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the increasing tendency to justify interventions by assertions of scientific truth that bely the uncertainty of the evidence on which they are based. Nowhere, perhaps, is this more obvious than in the case of mandatory face masks in community settings… Nothing… Read More »