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Last week saw only my fourth visit to the Lords from the north-east since the pandemic began. From the “Lords Diary” feature at PoliticsHome: I wandered the ghostly corridors of Westminster hoping to spot a few colleagues and got lost in a one-way system. This hybrid Parliament seems to have made the government’s job more […]

Respiratory viruses tend to evolve to be more transmissible but less virulent This blog post was adapted from this Twitter thread: Articles often claim that the Delta variant is more virulent, e.g. “Citing the spread of the more virulent Delta coronavirus variant in the United Kingdom”. Earlier in the year the same was said about […]

Again and again, worst-case scenarios are presented with absurd precision, and the problem goes further than Britain’s slow reopening My article for The Telegraph: Britain leads the pack on vaccination, but lags far behind America, Germany and France on liberation. A big reason is that our Government remains in thrall to a profession that has […]

My article for Spectator: In March last year, it was widely agreed by everybody sensible, me included, that talk of the pandemic originating in a laboratory was pseudoscientific nonsense almost on a par with UFOs and the Loch Ness monster. My own reasoning was that Mother Nature is a better genetic engineer than we will […]

Officialdom’s absurdly cautious approach is now impossible to justify given the success of vaccines My article for the Telegraph: The whole aim of practical politics, said HL Mencken, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” […]

My article for Spectator: In search of wisdom about how an officious government reluctantly relaxes its grip after an emergency, I stumbled on a 1948 newsreel clip of Harold Wilson when he was president of the Board of Trade. It’s a glimpse of long-forgotten and brain-boggling complexity in the rationing system. ‘We have taken some […]

My article from Warp News: At a time when the miraculous success of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 has transformed the battle against the pandemic, it is fitting to recall that the general idea behind vaccination was brought to the attention of the western world, not by brilliant and privileged professors, but by a black slave and […]

The WHO has now wasted a year failing to investigate properly the origins of Covid-19 My article for The Telegraph: It is a year ago last week since the World Health Organisation conceded, belatedly, that a pandemic was under way. The organisation’s decisions in early 2020 were undoubtedly influenced by the Chinese government. On 14 […]

This is a more detailed version of the article co-written with Alina Chan on the origin of the virus causing the Covid pandemic which was published in the Telegraph on 6 February. “Viral” by Matt Ridley is coming later this year. Sign up for his newsletter and follow him on Facebook and Twitter to learn […]

The evolution of Covid is not random My article for The Spectator: In the genetic diaspora of an epidemic, there is ferocious competition between strains of virus to get to the next victim first. That leads to apparently purposeful outcomes, as if the virus had a mind. One of the things people find hardest to […]