“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, …
How Edinburgh University stifled my investigation
Almost 150 years ago, a young medical student at Edinburgh University was inspired by one of his lecturers to devise a detective with remarkable powers of deduction based on solid scientific principles. Arthur Conan Doyle wanted a hero for the …
Anders Tegnell’s lesson for the Covid Inquiry
After thousands of hours of political inquisition and motivated reasoning, the UK Covid Inquiry has finally allowed mention of the single most important control group in the global lockdown experiment: Sweden. A written submission by former State Epidemiologist of Sweden …
Will Bidenism outlive Biden?
“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals, we now know that it is bad economics,” said Franklin D. Roosevelt at the height of the Great Depression. It is a lesson that President Joe Biden has taken to …