The unaffordable cost of living
Rishi-eat-out-to-help-out Sunak has been busy recently trying to address the snowballing cost of living crisis faced by millions of UK citizens. He announced new policies to help those who will find the ‘struggle is too hard and the risks too...
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The Long COVID Report
The All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) report into Long COVID was released about a month ago. One important detail is that of the 14 members of the Group, from many different parties, and from both the House of Commons and Lords,...
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Cancer during COVID
How our research on antimicrobial resistance & health inequalities became more personal In 2019 I was awarded a Wellcome Trust grant. My project promised to look at the question of inequality and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) from different perspectives in the...
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The fleeting solidarities of the pandemic?
Click the play button on the sound file below. It is the sound of the street in Aberdeen where I live recorded on April 2nd2020. I recorded the soundfile during the weekly Clap for Carers event, where the dedication of...
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Uncertainty, Polarisation and COVID
Uncertainty has become a staple of day to day life across the world in the past two years. The COVID pandemic has introduced uncertainty into all aspects of life, affecting our interactions with others, our work and home lives and...
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Quarantine diary
Ahead of the annual pilgrimage to our country of birth, my family and I have to undertake a new set of rituals. The country formerly known as Great Britain has (belatedly) introduced a set of requirements to keep the COVID-19...
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Time and again? Temporality & public health
One thing that has struck me during the days and months since 23rd March 2020 has been how time has simultaneously slowed down and sped up. Or, more specifically, the passage of time has both sped up and slowed down....
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Why policy makers and scientists are always wrong about obesity
A recent article that we wrote raises a number of important questions about obesity. Why do policy attempts to control obesity fail? Why do scientists ask the wrong questions about obesity? Why does searching for single causes of the so-called...
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Long COVID
We may not yet understand much about the causes and implications of the collection of symptoms occurring post COVID-19 infection that has been labelled Long COVID. But we already understand far more than we think we do about the experiences...
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Participatory Ideology: From exclusion to involvement
This is not a trick question. What is the link between recruiting a photographer at significant taxpayers’ expense to take cuddly, self-glorifying photos of a pet dog and a high level of successful appeals without precedent by disabled people against...
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How to Prevent Another COVID-19 Pandemic
The world is still trying to contain the spread of COVID-19. But world leaders must already come up with ways to prevent another pandemic. The novel coronavirus’s adverse impacts prove this need, having infected over 97 million people and resulting...
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The flailing PM is rewriting history to claim ‘COVID success’.