Interview: How Science Lost the Public’s Trust
Matt Ridley
From climate to Covid, politics and hubris have disconnected scientific institutions from the philosophy and method that ought to guide them. My interview with Tunku Varadarajan in the Wall Street Journal: “Science” has become a political catchword. “I believe in science,” Joe Biden tweeted six days before he was elected president. “Donald Trump doesn’t. It’s that simple, folks.” But what […]
Matt Ridley
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 […]
The Covid lab leak theory is looking increasingly plausible
Matt Ridley
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 […]
The World Health Organisation’s appeasement of China has made another pandemic more likely
Matt Ridley
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 […]
Did the Covid-19 virus really escape from a Wuhan lab?
Matt Ridley
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 World Needs a Real Investigation Into the Origin of Covid-19
Matt Ridley
A team of WHO researchers has arrived in China but won’t investigate the possibility that the coronavirus originated in a lab. My article for the Wall Street Journal, with Dr. Chan: In the first week of January, scientists representing the World Health Organization (WHO) were due to arrive in China to trace the origins of […]
