…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 »
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 »
…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 »
‘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 »
… 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 »