Mistakes of the Masters: the problem with Chief Scientific Officers
A Frenchman who arrives in London, will find philosophy, like everything else, very much changed there. He had left the world a plenum, and he now finds it a vacuum. At Paris the universe is seen composed of vortices of...
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What we have seen Some people feel so strongly about what has happened during COVID that they are hanging professionally made posters on their houses. Preparations being made for first post lockdown market. New rules for going to...
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Why are black & Asian people at greater risk of coronavirus?
The coronavirus pandemic has markedly increased awareness of health inequalities. Researchers have long understood that ethnicity and socioeconomic conditions play a major role in influencing our health, but the pandemic has illuminated these stark inequalities and the need for urgent action...
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What we have seen this week Protests outside Oriel College, Oxford, to remove the statue of white supremacist Cecil Rhodes Poster seen on wall. ‘Keep your distance’ notice on classroom door in Sweden. The classroom is the same size as...
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Lay epidemiology and COVID-19
Was the COVID-19 virus moving around the world in late 2019? And did we actually already have that information, but lacked the collective framework to make lay epidemiology coherent? In terms of seeding and propagating the COVID-19 virus within the...
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Tenacious hope
With widespread lock-down measures to counteract the spread of COVID-19 infection, the possibility of the world under a radically changed order proved fascinating. Despite the suffering of the pandemic, were we getting glimpses of a better world? Unpolluted city vistas,...
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What We Have Seen Easy to do the right thing (?) Social distancing advice in a Swedish restaurant. Pop up caravan shop outside a local pub in Colchester has decided to leave the precise distance up to the individual customer’s...
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British inequality: It’s time to trust hungry people
Carl Walker and colleagues make the case for food poverty as a public health emergency and call for concerted response from govt to inequalities only made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Public fundraising for the NHS, and its discomforts
The fundraising of Captain Tom Moore and many others during the coronavirus outbreak has propelled charitable giving to the NHS into the public eye. At the time of writing, NHS Charities Together had raised over £100 million for its emergency...
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Pick a number, any number…
In the run-up to the 2019 general election, I wrote a piece about Boris Johnsons’ strategy for dealing with awkward interview questions. This outlined comment from Johnson himself, where he sketched his dead cat strategy. When faced with an impossible...
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The Whisper Network
On the 17th of March, 5 days after Denmark announced its official COVID lockdown, I received a surreptitious Facebook message from a Danish friend. ‘I’ve heard around they are going to make a full ban of going out of your...
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Life Interrupted: COVID lockdown and Black Lives Matter