The Decameron Revisited – Pandemic as Farce
One of the sleeper hits for Netflix UK this summer has been a reimagining of Bocaccio’s Decameron as a commentary on pandemic behavior. In one sense, it is an obvious thing to do. The original was...
View ArticlePandemic Nemesis: Illich reconsidered
An unexpected element of post-pandemic reflections has been the revival of interest in the work of Ivan Illich, a significant public intellectual of the 1960s and 1970s, whose star has waned somewhat...
View ArticleLong Covid – A Contested Disorder
All pandemics of novel infectious diseases are accompanied by social pandemics of fear and action. Unless the social pandemics are artificially prolonged, they eventually subside as people come to a...
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Pandemic London – and the Future of Publishing?
Last week, I spent a very pleasant evening at one of the surviving medieval churches in the City of London – the foundations of St Giles Cripplegate go back at least one thousand years, although most...
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Pandemic Management – The Path Not Taken
Signs outside the Sahlgrenska hospital emergency reception area in February 2020 order virus patients to stay outside and summon hospital staff by pressing a button. (Photo: BIL,/CC BY-SA 4.0/...
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The Science Media Centre at 20
The UK’s Science Media Centre (SMC) is an internationally admired, and occasionally emulated, model for facilitating interactions between the science community and the cadre of specialist journalists...
View ArticleNot 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...
View ArticleLockdown is Another Triumph of Populism Over Science – Most People Have...
By popular request, I am posting this as a free-access version of one of the first commentary pieces that I wrote for the UK press – Daily Telegraph March 24, 2020 All infectious disease outbreaks...
View Article(Belated) New Year Thoughts on the Barriers to Ending the Pandemic
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,...
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COVID-19, Face Masks and Research Integrity
One of the things I do in the day job is think about research ethics and research integrity. I have just finished working with a team to support policy development in these areas by the European...
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Has UK Sociology Marginalized Itself on Some of the Great Issues of Our Time?
Has sociology’s macrocephalic focus on one issue left a vacuum for scholarship on broader issues? (Photo: Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons) Through a series of historical accidents, I happened to...
View ArticleBioethicists are Supposed to Stand Up for Bodily Autonomy in the Pandemic....
“A leading association of bioethicists has come squarely behind the idea of mandated vaccination. A statement issued by the Association of Bioethics Program Directors (ABPD) declared that ‘To protect...
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COVID-19, Masks and Magical Thinking
“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...
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Covid-19: How to Learn the Lessons of Policy Failure
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....
View ArticleTraditional Chinese Medicine and the Covid-19 Pandemic
When medical sociologists or anthropologists write about alternative or complementary medicine, some readers inevitably assume that this is done in a spirit of advocacy. This is sometimes true. Some...
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COVID Science and Politics – the Case of Face Masks
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...
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Florence Nightingale at Home (with COVID-19)
‘Florence Nightingale in the Military Hospital at Scutari,’ a lithograph from 1855 by Joseph Austin Benwell showing the pioneering nurse serving the wounded of the Crimean War. (Image: National Army...
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COVID Variants – Time to Stop Jumping at Shadows
Former UK Prime Minister Theresa May spoke truth to power in the House of Commons last month. The Government, she said, was not leveling with the British people about three things:• We were not going...
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COVID-19: Blood on Whose Hands?
As the UK Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van Tam said in a recent press conference, the current statistics on COVID-19 infections may be almost as good as we will ever get. When the reports of...
View ArticleResisting the Biosecurity State
These are extraordinary times, and not just because we are coming through the greatest national trauma since the Second World War. The vaccination programme is something close to a modern miracle....
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