Clik here to view.
Tamiflu and the Ethics of the British Medical Journal
Last week, the UK media, both traditional and social, were full of claims that the government had wasted over £500 million of public funds on stockpiling Tamiflu (oseltamivir), an anti-viral drug used...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Ebola – WHO (Still) Don’t Get It: Social Science Saves Lives
The World Health Organization Executive Board has just met to prepare for the May 2015 World Health Assembly. The board had a special session on the Ebola outbreak, which demonstrated how little its...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Coronavirus, Wuhan, and Social Science
Public fear seems inevitable given the alarming updates on the coronavirus outbreak, and isolation — in the forms of lockdown and quarantine — has become our default response.As a social scientist in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How Coronavirus Became a Political Problem
Image by: Dipartimento Protezione Civile, Italy The Italian government’s decision to expand its lockdown from two small areas of the north to encompass the entire country is a sign of its increasing...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Is Our War with the Environment Leading to Pandemics?
The COVID-19 pandemic sweeping across the world is a crisis of our own making.That’s the message from infectious disease and environmental health experts, and from those in planetary health – an...
View ArticleClik here to view.
COVID-19 UK: How Do Pandemics Come to an End?
In the midst of the present chaos, it is easy to forget that the world has had pandemics before and that they have come to an end. Can we learn anything from these experiences that might help us in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Coronavirus UK – Could We Live With a ‘Second Influenza’?
Somewhere along the line we have lost a sense of proportion about the COVID-19 pandemic. At the beginning, we were rightly concerned that a novel virus, to which human populations had never been...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Coronavirus UK – A Nasty Infection But Let’s Have a Sense of Proportion
Are we threatened by a Second Wave of COVID-19? The prime minister seems to think so, although the scientific community is less certain. Some scientists believe COVID-19 will behave like influenza –...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Coronavirus UK – Is COVID-19 a Disease?
Ebola public health wall message in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The World Health Organization’s review of its handling of the 2013 Ebola outbreak in West Africa had underlined the lack of early social...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Coronavirus UK – Patrician Policymaking
Benjamin Disraeli The novels of the 19th century Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli are little known today, with the exception of a passage from Sybil (1845) about the condition of England....
View ArticleClik here to view.
We Must Learn to Live With the Virus – Just Like Samuel Pepys Lived With the...
A scene by Edmund Evans from the Great Plague – the call to “bring out your dead.” Pepys wrote: “I looked into the street and saw fires burning in the street, as it is through the whole city by the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
No One Can Ensure Total Safety… We Must Fight Pandemic of FEAR
Just about 12 months ago, the Sunday Express first approached me to comment on a mystery virus that was reported to be infecting people in Wuhan in China. At the time I was contemplating my...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Opinion: We Must Resist the Powerful Voices Arguing for Zero COVID
This piece is more focused on UK experience than some of my other posts on the pandemic. The Zero COVID movement seems to have been quite varied in its societal impact, reflecting different national...
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....
View ArticleClik here to view.
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 ArticleClik here to view.
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
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...
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
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 Article