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 »
Can Systemic Corruption be Prevented by Legal Means? The Market for Pharmaceuticals in Southern Ethiopia Some international and national regulatory and policy actors assume that strengthening domestic laws and tightening enforcement measures will be sufficient to reduce the extra-legal supply of medicines, whether legal, substandard, or falsified, to patients in low- and middle-income countries. The… 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 »
The constitutional processes are now complete and Robert F Kennedy, Jr has been confirmed as Secretary for Health and Human Services despite a vicious, and at times vitriolic, campaign waged by the biomedical and public health establishment. For more than fifty years, I have been reading work by US medical sociologists on the power and… Read More »
It is widely reported that one of the first acts of the incoming Trump administration will be to withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO). Predictably, responses are divided. US nationalists dislike the growing efforts to turn WHO into some form of world government with authority to dictate health policies to individual states. Against this,… Read More »
The proposed appointment of Robert F Kennedy Jr as Secretary for Health and Human Services (HHS) has provoked howls of outrage from many prominent figures in the US medical, bioethical and public health establishment. No doubt it was intended to do so. One does not have to accept his answers to many of the key… 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/
“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 »