WELCOME TO MATT RIDLEY'S BLOG

My article for The Spectator: Ever since Giacomo Pylarini, a physician working in the Ottoman Empire, sent a report to the Royal Society in 1701 that Turkish women believed pus from a smallpox survivor could induce immunity in a healthy person – and was dismissed as a dangerous quack – inoculation has been as much […]

A range of statistics suggest the number of cases was under control before Thursday’s nation-wide shutdown My article for The Telegraph: There is now little doubt that the second wave of the virus crested before the lockdown began on Thursday. On Friday the Government announced that the number of new positive tests over the previous […]

I supported shutting down the country last spring, but we are in a very different situation now My article for The Telegraph: I was in favour of a national lockdown in the spring. I am not now, for six main reasons. Covid is not a very dangerous disease for most people. The death rate is […]

There is no course that involves zero suffering. It’s a question of minimizing it An expanded version of my article for Spectator: It is counterintuitive but the current spread of Covid may on balance be the least worst thing that could happen now. In the absence of a vaccine, and with no real prospect of […]

Letter from 12 Conservative peers to The Times: Sir, It is now clear that a policy of lockdown failed to bring the virus under control while having crippling economic and social side effects. Sweden has achieved a lower death rate from Covid-19 than the UK, with far less economic and social damage, despite being a […]

The scientific method remains the best way to solve many problems, but bias, overconfidence and politics can sometimes lead scientists astray My article for the Wall Street Journal: The Covid-19 pandemic has stretched the bond between the public and the scientific profession as never before. Scientists have been revealed to be neither omniscient demigods whose […]

A groundbreaking new study points to a cheap, safe, effective way of tackling Covid My article with MP David Davis, for the Telegraph: As we face six tough months of curfews, isolation and economic misery, with vaccines a distant hope, testing struggling to control the virus, and the hospitalisation rate once again rising, it’s surely […]

Hart explains why we’re adapted to the environment we evolved in, rather than the one we inhabit My review of Unfit for Purpose: When human evolution collides with the modern world by Adam Hart, for The Critic: Our ancestors have spent a few hundred years in cities at most. Before that, they spent a million […]

JBS Haldane was a polymath — but his communist faith blinded him to the truth about the Soviet Union My article for The Times: When he knew he was dying, the scientist JBS Haldane wrote that he hadn’t walked on the seafloor from England to France, but he had been wounded in war, known the […]

From vaccine triumphs to leadership learning curves, we can finally dare to hope for a breakthrough My article for The Telegraph: Like the ancient mariner, the virus refuses to leave us alone. Resurging in Blackburn, Spain, and America, it is still going to be around here when the winter comes. As we head indoors, it […]