New Podcast on UK Covid Pandemic Management
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/
Tag Archives: Public health
Can we trust the World Health Organization with so much power?
“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 »
Face mask evangelism, trust and democracy
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 »
Face Masks and Covid – A Failed Technology
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 »
Face Masks for Covid: An Obituary?
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 »
Orientalism and the Advocacy of Face Masks
…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 »
Masks and Covid: The Mystery of the Missing RCTs
Inspector Gregory: Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention? Holmes: To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. Inspector Gregory: The dog did nothing in the night-time. Holmes: That was the curious incident. The Adventure of Silver Blaze (1892) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle …The lack… Read More »
King Canute and the Cult of Zero Infection
…Even a monarch cannot countermand the fundamentals of the universe. This is a lesson that some still struggle with in considering the goals of clinical medicine and public health. If they only had enough money, power and time, biomedical scientists could eliminate infection and, at least by implication, allow humans to live forever. Philosophers, ethicists… Read More »
Pandemic Management – The path not taken
‘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 »
Not Rewriting the history of the pandemic
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 »