On 25 March, 2020, at the height of the Covid pandemic, a single piece of paper, a directive signed by Andrew Cuomo, then the governor of New York, brought about thousands of deaths in nursing homes and similar care facilities. …
The lost innocence of Grey’s Anatomy
I first heard about Grey’s Anatomy on the school bus. I’m turning 32 this week, and Grey’s is turning 20. It was the spring of 2005, when ABC launched this two-decade medical drama about the life and times of Dr. …
How lockdown created Starmerism
Naff; garish; tedious; mandatory; much hyped at the time; discrediting to many; ending with a large damages bill and a collective pact of forgetting — lockdown was an office Christmas party on a national scale. Five years on, almost nothing …
Crunchy moms aren’t scared of measles
“I had measles when I was a kid,” reminisced Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a 2021 podcast interview. “I had 11 brothers and sisters — we all got measles. It was a great week. We stayed home. We watched Sea …
Scepticism won’t save you
In 1939, with his native Germany under totalitarian rule, Bertolt Brecht wrote a poem. Called “In Praise of Doubt” it encourages readers to always question established orthodoxies. Brecht mocks “the thoughtless who never doubt”, and who “don’t believe in the …
Will our universities ever recover from Covid?
From job losses to course closures, British universities are in meltdown — as panicked institutions are desperately shedding their crumbling 20th century identities. Yet if academics, subjects and even physical buildings all look set to go, with administrators scrambling to …
‘Experts’ killed trust in vaccines
Vaccination rates against childhood diseases have been on a downward slide for the past few years in the United States. Nationally, for example, the share of kindergarteners with completed records for the measles vaccine dropped to 93 percent last year, …
Are you a board game loser?
What is your most shameful memory of an argument over a board game? Though the details are blurry, mine involves the mid Nineties, a sister, a boyfriend, a bottle of tequila and a game of Trivial Pursuit. The subsequent emotional …
Australia has shown the way on free speech
In what might be a world first, the Australian parliament has just dealt a death blow to counter-disinformation legislation that threatened to fundamentally reshape the country’s free speech landscape. The bill, which would have created a two-tier system of speech …
Covid masked liberal weakness
Donald Trump is back in the White House — and among Democrats, the blame game has already begun. Nancy Pelosi, for instance, has claimed that Joe Biden should have held off supporting Kamala Harris, instead encouraging an open primary. Harris …
Meet the alt-Right Crunchy Mums
If you were lucky enough to have a mother growing up, there are a few moments you’ll probably remember. In the middle of the night, stumping over from your bedroom to admit “I frew up”. The ceremonial bringing out of …
How the NYT undermined mask evidence
Amid the storm of US election headlines in recent weeks, a snippet of news began bubbling up on social media that, only a few years ago, would have whipped up a frenzied media hurricane. President Biden had tested positive for …
SARS-CoV-2: What’s in a name? Everything.
Republished from Jonathan’s Substack
“Naming is everything” might be a trite observation, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, popularly regarded as the father of the discipline of public relations[1], used to advise charities …
Public Health & Natural Rights: A Tale of Two Cities
One cannot inject a healthy child from the day of birth and believe in the natural rights of the individual.
If the basic functioning of the nature we as humans are born with is so flawed that we need repeated …
Revisiting China: Did a Pandemic really start in Wuhan?
Nearly four years ago, on 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared that “Covid-19 could be characterised as a pandemic.”[1] The series of events leading up to this remarkable statement began only ten weeks earlier (December 31, …
