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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 […]

Provided we learn the lessons of the first wave we will have little to fear as we reopen our economy My article for the Telegraph: It is now three weeks since thousands of protesters first gathered in Trafalgar Square, and two weeks since London filled with even larger crowds, few of whom wore masks or […]

My article with MP David Davis for The Telegraph: Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College “stepped back” from the Sage group advising ministers when his lockdown-busting romantic trysts were exposed. Perhaps he should have been dropped for a more consequential misstep. Details of the model his team built to predict the epidemic are emerging and they […]

There has long been evidence that a sufficiency of vitamin D protects against viruses My article for The Telegraph: A suggestive set of numbers was published online in April by a medical scientist in the Philippines, Dr Mark Alipio. Of 49 patients with mild symptoms of Covid-19 in three hospitals in southern Asian countries, only […]

My article for The Telegraph: When the pandemic passes, which it will, there will be a reckoning to determine who could have stopped it early and did not. Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, has suggested that it would have to be carried out by the World Health Organisation: “Obviously, after the crisis has abated I […]

My article for The Telegraph: ‘This pestilence was so powerful that it was transmitted to the healthy by contact with the sick” wrote Giovanni Boccaccio of the Black Death, in his preface to The Decameron. The trouble with the coronavirus is almost exactly the opposite – it is transmitted to the sick by contact with […]

My article for the Telegraph: In 1934, in their spare time, two American biologists, Pearl Kendrick and Grace Eldering, developed a vaccine for whooping cough, then the biggest killer of children in the United States. Within four years their vaccine was being used throughout Michigan and within six it was being used nationwide. Whooping cough […]

Culture and practice can change without putting Big Brother in charge My article for The Telegraph: In the 19th century Ignaz Semmelweis was vilified and ostracised when he tried to make doctors wash their hands after doing autopsies on women who had died from childbirth fever before going straight upstairs to deliver more babies. We […]

Countries that turn their backs on cheap energy lose out I have an op-ed in the Daily Telegraph on the economics of shale gas in Britain: As part of today’s Autumn Statement, George Osborne is expected to approve the building of 30 gas-fired power stations, simplify the regulatory process for fracking and provide tax breaks […]

The fruit of a narrow-leaved campion, buried in permafrost by a ground squirrel 32,000 years ago on the banks of the Kolyma river in Siberia, has been coaxed into growing into a new plant, which then successfully set seed itself in a Moscow laboratory. Although this plant species was not extinct, inch by inch scientists […]