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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.” […]

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 […]

Like the Ming empire before it, bureaucratic tyranny is immiserating a beautiful and cultured place My article for The Telegraph: There is something rather apt in the coincidence of an Italian ban on vaccine exports to Australia and the negotiation by Liz Truss, the trade secretary, of lower tariffs on trade with the United States. […]

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 list of our achievements in biology is extraordinary for a country with just one per cent of the world’s population My latest article, for The Telegraph: Britain probably leads the world in self-criticism. So maybe we don’t always notice when the country leads the world in something a bit more useful. During the pandemic […]

Tough restrictions keep the virus spreading mainly among the very ill, meaning more lethal strains can dominate milder ones My article for The Telegraph: Boris Johnson’s fondness for the metaphor of the US cavalry riding to the rescue is risky: ask General Custer. With the vaccine cavalry in sight, and just when we thought we […]

A technical fix should bring the Covid nightmare to an end where so many other strategies have failed My article for The Telegraph: Happy Christmas! The BioNtech/Pfizer vaccine’s approval, with others to come, is the best possible news at the end of a ghastly year. Vaccination is humankind’s most life-saving innovation, banishing scourge after scourge […]

While climate change is a real issue and must be tackled, the prime minister’s 10-commandment plan is not the way to go about it My article for The Telegraph: Our fearless leader has descended from the mountain with a 10-commandment plan for a green industrial revolution. At a cost of £12 billion, he will have […]

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 […]